Liam Carson

Liam Carson was born in 1962. His father, the late Liam Mac Carráin, was well-known as a postman, Irish-language and Esperanto activist, writer and much-loved storyteller. Liam studied English literature and philosophy at University College Dublin, where he was a students' union councillor and auditor of the Contemporary Music Society. Liam is the director and founder of the IMRAM Irish-Language Literature Festival, which reveals the diversity of modern Irish-language literature through imaginative and eclectic events. Over the past twenty years, Liam has also worked as a literary publicist for many Irish publishers — including Lilliput, Blackstaff, Wolfhound, Mercier, and Cois Life. Authors he has worked with include Paul Durcan, John Waters, the late John Moriarty, Ken Bruen, Liam Ó Muirthile, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Fionnuala O Connor and Jonathan Bardon. His reviews, critical articles, essays and poems have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including Poetry Ireland Review, Fortnight, The Irish Review, New Hibernia Review, Comhar, An Guth, Irish Examiner and Sunday Tribune. In 2010 Hag's Head Press published Call Mother a Lonely Field, a critically acclaimed memoir by Liam Carson which mines the emotional archaeology of family, home and language, our attempts to break their tethers, and the refuge we take within them.