Harry Clifton

• Name — Harry Clifton • Born — 1952 • Birthplace — Dublin, Ireland • Occupation — Poet • Education — Blackrock College University College Dublin • Awards — Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award (1981) Poetry Now Award (2008) • Spouse — Deirdre Madden Harry Clifton (born 1952) is an Irish poet.

Clifton was born in Dublin, where he was educated at Blackrock College and University College, Dublin. He has three younger brothers and two sisters. After graduating, Clifton began an extended period of travel outside of Ireland. Many of his experiences from this time had a major influence on his poetry because he believes the true home of the poet is 'not in a place, but in the language itself'. He has lived in places throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. He lectured at a teacher training college in Nigeria in the early 1970s. He worked as an aid administrator in Thailand for Indo-Chinese refugees in the 1980s. He lived in Italy's Abruzzi Mountains, Switzerland, England and Germany before settling in Paris for ten years. He was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in New Hampshire, an International Fellow at the University of Iowa, and a representative for Ireland at the International Writing Program in Iowa. He has held many teaching positions at universities, including Bremen and Bordeaux in France, and Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, in Ireland. In 2021, he was made an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He now lives in Dublin with his wife, Irish novelist Deirdre Madden, and teaches at University College Dublin.

He has published twelve books of poetry, with work from his first four collections included in The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-88, published in 1992 by the Gallery Press in Ireland and Bloodaxe Books in Britain, with a foreword by Derek Mahon. His latest titles are The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), Portobello Sonnets (2017), and Herod's Dispensations (2019), all published by Bloodaxe Books in Britain and Ireland, and by Wake Forest University Press in the United States. A new collection, Gone Self Storm, was published by both publishers in 2023. He wrote On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi (Macmillan, 1999), a prose work based on the year he spent in Italy. He recorded his life in Paris in Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994–2004 (Wake Forest University Press, 2007). His poems have been translated into several European languages, with a French translation of selected poems, Le Canto d'Ulysse, published in 1996. He also published a book of stories, Berkeley's Telephone & Other Fictions (Lilliput Press, 2000).

• The Walls of Carthage, Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1977 • The Office of the Salt Merchant, Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1979 • Comparative Lives, Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1982 • The Liberal Cage, Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1988 • The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-1988, Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1992; Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992; • Night Train Through the Brenner, Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1994 • Le Canto d'Ulysse, ed. Nicole Ollier with various translators, Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1996 • Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2007 • The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2012; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2012 • The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2014; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2012 • Portobello Sonnets, Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2012; Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2017 • Herod's Dispensations, Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2019; Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2019 • Gone Self Storm, Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2023; Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2023

• Berkeley's Telephone & Other Fictions, Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000

• On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi, London: Macmillan, 1999