James Harpur

James Harpur (born 1956) is a British-born Irish poet who has published eight books of poetry. He has won a number of awards, including the Michael Hartnett Award and the UK National Poetry Competition. He has also published books of non-fiction and a novel, The Pathless Country. He lives in West Cork and is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts. Harpur studied Classics and English at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a joint-winner of the Powell Prize for Poetry. He taught English on the island of Crete and has subsequently worked as a lexicographer and freelance writer.

Works

Poetry Many of the poems of his first collection, A Vision of Comets, take their inspiration from his time on Crete and from the Aegean area. In 1995 he won the UK National Poetry Competition with a sonnet sequence, ‘The Frame of Furnace Light’, about the death of his father. The poem was published in his second book, The Monk’s Dream. In 2000 Harpur became poet in residence in Exeter Cathedral, as part of the UK’s ‘Year of the Artist’ scheme. In 2002 he moved to Ireland and settled in West Cork, near the town of Clonakilty. and The Examined Life (2021), described by Stephen Fry as a ‘quite marvellous work … an Odyssey, a Ulysses shaken up in the snow-dome of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’

Fiction In 2021 Harpur published his first novel, The Pathless Country, winner of the J.G. Farrell Award and an Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair award. The story is set in early-1900s Ireland and London and features a number of historical characters, including W.B. Yeats, Annie Besant, and J. Krishnamurti. In a review of The White Silhouette, Michael O’Neill wrote: ‘I have rarely encountered a contemporary voice that brings out as strongly and convincingly as does James Harpur’s in The White Silhouette the way in which spiritual wrestlings and traditions can live again in poetry.’

Prizes and awards

Poetry

Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize 2016 Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship 2013 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2009 UK National Poetry Competition 1995

Fiction (for The Pathless Country The Magic Theatre, Two Rivers Press, 2025 The Gospel of Gargoyle, Eblana Press, 2024 The Oratory of Light, Wild Goose, 2021 The Examined Life, Two Rivers Press, 2021 The White Silhouette, Carcanet, 2018 Angels and Harvesters, Anvil Press Poetry, 2012 The Gospel of Joseph of Arimathea, Wild Goose, 2008 The Dark Age, Anvil Press Poetry, 2007 Oracle Bones, Anvil Press Poetry, 2001 The Monk’s Dream, Anvil Press Poetry, 1996 A Vision of Comets, Anvil Press Poetry, 1993

Translation Fortune’s Prisoner: The poems of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Anvil Press Poetry, 2007

Fiction

The Pathless Country, Cinnamon Press, 2021

Non-fiction Dazzling Darkness: The Lives and Afterlives of the Christian Mystics, Hurst Publishers, 2025 With Sappho in the Antipathies, Hybrid Publishers, 2025 The Pilgrim Journey (non-fiction), BlueBridge, 2015 The Atlas of Sacred Places: Meeting Points of Heaven and Earth (1st ed.) (non-fiction), Henry Holt, 1994

Author's work in translation

Il Vangelo della Gargouille, translated and edited by Francesca Diano, Valentina Editrice, 2025 Il vento e la creta, Anthology translated and edited by Francesca Diano, Molesini Editore, 2024 San Simeone Stilita, translated and edited by Francesca Diano Project Edizioni, 2017