Literary Belfast

Unquestionably, Belfast now attracts global literary renown and over the past four decades this has been its foremost imaginative export. Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney emerged in the sixties, and are known across the world as some of the finest poets writing in the English language. Subsequent generations have thrown up talents no less distinguished and distinct. Weekly Literary Tours will assist you as you journey through the literary city and the many shades of our history, taking you from the splendour of City Hall or the lives commemorated in Writer’s Square to back alleys and quiet suburban streets across the city where the finest of our writers lived.

Brian Moore, that unquiet exile, moved from Belfast to all corners of the globe, in life and in fiction, while illustrious visitors from John Keats to E.M. Forster, Anthony Trollope to Kate O’Brien, have entered the city and written about what they’ve seen and heard. Literary Belfast is very much alive, with a multitude of events, festivals and venues which will take you to places old and new, through history and the changing modern city alike.

While working as a tutor at Queen’s Seamus Heaney formed part of the famous Belfast ‘group’ of writers with Michael Longley, Stewart Parker, Ciaran Carson and many others. Their successors include Frank Ormsby, Tom Paulin and Gerald Dawe whilst Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey and Leontia Flynn, write at Queen’s today. Another Queen’s alumni, Paul Muldoon, is now one of the world’s most acclaimed poets and a Pulitzer prize winner, while brilliant short story writer Bernard McLaverty graduated in the 1970’s. Many years previously, Louis MacNeice, one of Northern Ireland’s finest poets, grew up on the Malone Road near Queen’s.

Creator of the Narnian Chronicles, CS Lewis wrote many of the haunts of his east Belfast boyhood into the magical series, while acclaimed novelist Brian Moore, author of the ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’ grew up in north Belfast.

Today, a new generation of Belfast novelists are spearheaded by Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson, whose 1996 novel 'Eureka Street' was televised by the BBC. Colin Bateman’s black comedy ‘Divorcing Jack’, set in Belfast at the end of the troubles, has also been filmed. Acclaimed and award winning playwrights Owen McCafferty and Daragh Carville have written for both stage and screen.

Click here to download a copy of the 'Literary Belfast Guide.'