Derek Mahon

1941 — 2020

Derek Mahon was a Northern Irish poet whose work — including Night-Crossing (1968), The Snow Party (1975), and The Hunt by Night (1982) — places him alongside Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley as one of the three great Northern Irish poets of his generation. 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' is widely regarded as one of the finest poems written in English in the twentieth century.

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PeriodModern

NationalityIrish

1. Biography

A short life of the author

Derek Mahon (1941–2020) was born on 23 November 1941 in Belfast. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne. He worked as a journalist and translator, living in London, New York, and Dublin.

Life and Career

Mahon’s early collections — Night-Crossing (1968), Lives (1972), The Snow Party (1975) — established him as a poet of formal elegance and cosmopolitan range. His poetry draws on European and American modernism — Stevens, Cavafy, Rimbaud — rather than on the rural Irish tradition that informed much of Heaney’s work.

“A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” (1975) — about mushrooms growing in an abandoned shed, waiting to be discovered — is his most famous poem and one of the great poems in the English language. It transforms a small, domestic image into a meditation on history, genocide, and the millions who have been forgotten.

The Hunt by Night (1982) and The Hudson Letter (1995) extended his range. Mahon was also a distinguished translator from the French.

Major Works and Themes

Mahon wrote about exile, history, the Troubles (obliquely), and the relationship between art and catastrophe. His poetry is formally precise, intellectually ambitious, and emotionally restrained.

Key Works

The Snow Party (1975)
The Hunt by Night (1982)

Collecting Mahon

Night-Crossing first edition (Oxford University Press, 1968) brings $100–$300. Gallery Press editions from Ireland are sought by collectors. Mahon died in 2020.