Harry Clifton was born in 1952 in Dublin, and educated at University College Dublin. After graduating he began an extended period of life outside Ireland, lecturing at a Teacher Training College in West Africa in the 1970s and working as an aid administrator in Indochina in the 1980s. Experiences from this time had a major influence on his work, including his belief that ‘the true home of the poet is not in a place but in the language itself’. After spells in Italy, England and Germany, he settled with his wife the Irish novelist Deirdre Madden for ten years in Paris, a decade recorded in Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (Wake Forest University Press, 2008). Since 2004 he has lived in Ireland, and teaches at Trinity College Dublin.
He has published twelve books of poetry, the most recent of which are The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), Portobello Sonnets (2017), Herod's Dispensations (2019) and Gone Self Storm (2023), all published by Bloodaxe Books in Britain and Ireland, and by Wake Forest University Press in the USA. His prose books include On the Spine of Italy, a travel memoir (Macmillan, 1999), and Ireland and its Elsewheres, lectures on Irish poetry, (University College Dublin Press, 2015).
Harry Clifton has held many teaching positions at universities including Bremen in Germany and Bordeaux in France, as well as University College Dublin and Trinity College in Ireland. In 2008 he won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award for Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, and The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass – which was shortlisted for the same award – was the Irish Times Book of the Year for 2012. He served as the fifth Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2010–2013, and is a member of Aosdána.
