Poet and novelist Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1948. After graduating from Queen's University, Belfast, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland until 1998. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.
His collections of poetry include The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; and First Language: Poems (1993), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. His prose includes The Star Factory (1997) and Fishing for Amber (1999). His most recent novel, Shamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present in Jan van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation of Dante's Inferno was published in November 2002. Breaking News (2003), won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year). His most recent poetry collection is For All We Know (2008), shortlisted for both the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award.
Ciaran Carson is also an accomplished musician, and is the author of Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996), a study of Irish traditional music. He lives in Belfast.
The New Estate Blackstaff Press, 1976
The Lost Explorer Ulsterman Publications, 1978
Irish Traditional Music Appletree Press, 1986
The Irish for No The Gallery Press, 1987
The New Estate and Other Poems The Gallery Press, 1988
Belfast Confetti Bloodaxe, 1990
First Language: Poems Gallery Books, 1993
Belfast Frescoes (with John Kindness) Ulster Museum, 1995
Letters from the Alphabet The Gallery Press, 1995
Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music Cape, 1996
Opera Et Cetera Bloodaxe, 1996
The Star Factory Granta, 1997
The Alexandrine Plan (adaptations of sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud) The Gallery Press, 1998
Fishing for Amber Granta, 1999
The Ballad of HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems Picador, 1999
The Twelfth of Never Picador, 1999
Shamrock Tea Granta, 2001
The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (translator) Granta, 2002
Breaking News The Gallery Press, 2003
The Midnight Court/Brian Merriman (translator) The Gallery Press, 2005
The Tain (translator) Penguin, 2007
For All We Know The Gallery Press, 2008
The Pen Friend Blackstaff Press, 2009
1978 Eric Gregory Award
1987 Alice Hunt Bartlett Award The Irish for No
1990 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry Belfast Confetti
1993 T. S. Eliot Prize First Language: Poems
1997 Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) The Star Factory
2003 Cholmondeley Award
2003 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Breaking News
2008 Costa Poetry Award (shortlist) For All We Know
2008 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) For All We Know
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