Don Paterson © Paul Maddern

Don Paterson, poet and musician, was born in Dundee in 1963. He has published three collections of poetry with Faber, translations of Machado and Rilke, and a collection of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows (2004). He is also editor of 101 Sonnets (1999). He teaches creative writing at the University of St Andrews. His first collection, Nil Nil (1993), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. He has twice won the T.S. Eliot award for poetry, the second time for Landing Light (2003), which also won the Whitbread Prize for poetry.

‘Although Paterson’s poetry employs all the techniques of reflexivity – language games, metafiction, unreliable narration – that are usually thought of as definitively “postmodern”, it does so without falling prey to an enervated and dislocated subjectivity … In Landing Light Paterson seems to have found a new depth of purpose and moral seriousness for his flinty wit to spark off’ (Adam Newey).

The following recordings were made at the Louis MacNeice Centenary Celebration and Conference at Queen's University, Belfast in September 2007.

Soap Suds

The Poetry

Lines

The Error

The Lie

The Swing

Aphorisms

Two Trees

I love all films that start with rain

© All recordings copyright Don Paterson and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.

Don read with Paul Farley, Sinead Morrissey and Paul Muldoon.