Ciaran Berry was born in Dublin in 1971 and grew up in Carna, County Galway and Falcarragh, County Donegal.

He received his B.A. from the University of Ulster and his MFA from New York University and was awarded a New York Times Fellowship. His work has appeared in AGNI, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and The New Republic.

His poems have been widely published in American and Irish journals and selected for Best New Poets 2006 and Best American Poetry 2008. The Sphere of Birds, won the Crab Orchard Series Award of Southern Illinois University Press, the 2008 Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize and the inaugural Michael Murphy Memorial Award, 2011. In 2012 he received a Whiting Writers’ Award for poetry.

Ciaran Berry now lives in Connecticut and teaches at Trinity College in Hartford.

His subsequent collection The Dead Zoo was published in 2013. Ciaran Berry’s third collection, Liner Notes is due for publication in October 2018.

Ciaran Berry’s poetry seems conversational at a first glance. But his work, like Emily Brontë’s, possess the rare quality of ‘power of wing’. He can enter  imaginatively into the life of a hive of bees or the death of a rogue elephant, and he holds the door open for the reader. Memorable as these poems are, it is not enough to have read them — you want to be reading them, back in the world of this poet’s voice.
— Helen Dunmore

 

Videos

‘Slow Set’ from The Dead Zoo (2013)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwpMTTxdxs0