Tributes Paid To Ciaran Carson

Tributes have emerged following the death of highly-acclaimed Belfast poet Ciaran Carson.

The writer and musician passed away on Sunday 06 October, aged 70, following an illness.

Among the host of awards and recognition garnered throughout Mr Carsons career are the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize.

Born in Belfast in 1948, Carson graduated from Queen's University Belfast with a degree in English and served with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for over twenty years.

In 2003, he was appointed Professor or English and the Founding Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University.

Mr Carson published his first collection of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. He went on to publish fourteen collections of poems, five prose books and celebrated translations of the Dante's Inferno (2002), for which he was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Irish saga, Táin Bó Cúailnge (2007).

As well as a hugely celebrated career, Carson achieved success in his personal life also. He is survived by his wife, the acclaimed fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and their three children, Manus, Gerard and Mary.

Roisin McDonough, Chief Executive of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, paid tribute. She said: "Ciaran Carson was a poet of extraordinary breadth and depth, and one of the best and most respected of his generation. His work is steeped in the presence of Belfast, its history, its cityscape, its language and its music, all of which he lived and translated into words of rare insight and brilliance. Even in his later works, which had become more expansive in their scope, he remained an artist who was, to the end, made in Belfast."



(JG/MH)