14 Facts About Ciaran Carson

1.

Ciaran Gerard Carson was a Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist.

2.

Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast into an Irish-speaking family.

3.

Ciaran Carson's father, William, was a postman and his mother, Mary, worked in the linen mills.

4.

Ciaran Carson spent his early years in the lower Falls Road where he attended Slate Street School and then St Gall's Primary School, both of which subsequently closed.

5.

Ciaran Carson retired in 2016 but remained attached to the organisation on a part-time basis.

6.

In 2020, the Seamus Heaney Centre established two, annual Fellowships in memory of its first director, Ciaran Carson, and inspired by his writing about the city of Belfast in prose as well as poetry.

7.

Ciaran Carson died of lung cancer on 6 October 2019 at the age of 70.

8.

Ciaran Carson's prose includes The Star Factory and Fishing for Amber.

9.

Ciaran Carson was an accomplished musician, and the author of Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music, a study of Irish traditional music.

10.

Ciaran Carson wrote a bi-monthly column on traditional Irish music for The Journal of Music.

11.

In Ciaran Carson everything is rooted in the everyday, so the destruction of Dresden evokes memories of a particular Dresden shepherdess he had on the mantelpiece as a child and the destruction is described in terms of 'an avalanche of porcelain, sluicing and cascading'.

12.

Ciaran Carson was deeply influenced by Louis MacNeice and he included a poem called 'Bagpipe Music'.

13.

Ciaran Carson then entered a prolific phase in which the concern for language liberated him into a new creativity.

14.

Ciaran Carson published The Twelfth of Never, sonnets on fanciful themes:.