Derek Mahon

Norman Derek Mahon (23 November 1941 – 1 October 2020) was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins said of Mahon, "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."

Biography Derek Mahon was born on 23 November 1941 as the only child of Ulster Protestant working-class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland and Wolff while his mother worked at a local flax mill. During his childhood, he claims he was something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attended Skegoneill Primary School and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, or "Inst".

At Inst he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine in which Mahon produced some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton his early poems were highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents could not see the point of poetry, but he set out to prove them wrong after he won his school's Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem 'The power that gives the water breath'.

Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College Dublin in French, English, and Philosophy and where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He started to mature as a poet. He left Trinity in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966 he worked his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he published his first collection of poems Night Crossing. He later taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a freelance journalist. He lived in Kinsale, County Cork. On 23 March 2007, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He won the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection.

At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon has described himself as, an 'aesthete' with a penchant 'for left-wingery [...] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.'

His papers are held at Emory University.

In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ended its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.

On 1 October 2020, Mahon died in Cork after a short illness, aged 78.

He is survived by his partner Sarah Iremonger and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie. 1989 – Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize 1990 – Lannan Literary Awards for Poetry 1992 – The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Poetry Prize 2020 – Irish Times Poetry Now award