Derek Mahon

Born in Belfast in 1941, Derek Mahon was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has held journalistic and academic appointments in London and New York and is a member of Aosdána. Mahon's first poetry collection, Night Crossing, was published in 1968 and has been followed by twenty other collections over the years. His Collected Poems appeared in 1999 and his 2005 book, Harbour Lights, received the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Life on Earth (2008) was shortlisted for the 2009 International Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2009 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His most recent collection of poetry, An Autumn Wind, again published by Gallery Press, appeared in 2010.

Other awards include the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and Lannan and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2007, Mahon received the biennial David Cohen Prize to acknowledge a lifetime's achievement in literature. Named as one of the ten most important Irish writers of all time by the Irish Times in 1999, Mahon has been cited as a major influence by a number of Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland. He has also translated several plays from French and Greek into English. Derek Mahon lives in Kinsale, Co. Cork, Ireland.

Of Derek Mahon's work, Seamus Heaney has said:
"There is a copiousness and excitement about these poems found only in work of the highest order."