Ciaran Carson
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948.
His poetry collections include The New Estate (Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1976) which won the Eric Gregory Award; The Irish for No (Oldcastle, Co Meath, The Gallery Press, 1987, and subsequently Wake Forest Press, USA/Bloodaxe Books, UK), which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (Gallery Books, 1989, subsequently Wake Forest Press/Bloodaxe Books) which won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award for Irish Poetry, the Ewart-Biggs Prize, the Irish Book Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize; First Language (The Gallery Press/Wake Forest Press, 1993) which won the T.S. Eliot Prize; Opera et Cetera (The Gallery Press, 1996) which was a UK Poetry Book Society Choice; and simultaneously, The Twelfth of Never (London, Picador, 1999); The Ballad of HMS Belfast (Gallery, 1999); Breaking News (Gallery Press, 2003), for which he won the Forward Poetry Prize; and For All We Know (Gallery Press, 2008), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice.
He has made a new translation of The Táin (London, Penguin Classics, 2007)
He has also published two prose books, The Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music (Belfast, The Appletree Press, 1996), and Last Night’s Fun (London, Jonathan Cape, 1996); and one novel, Shamrock Tea (London, Granta Books, 2001).
He is a member of Aosdána and lives in Belfast.
