Radar: Current Cultural Picks 24.11.25

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Literary Belfast, Youtube

I stumbled across these videos last week on Youtube, and couldn’t stop watching them - what a hidden gem. They seem all the more poignant and significant now the likes of Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley are no longer with us. The big omission from the series, though, was Derek Mahon (a Belfast native who ended up leaving) and it’s regrettable that he hasn’t left as much of a digital footprint as the others, and I would have dearly loved to have heard him talk about Belfast. There is a documentary about him called The Poetry Nonsense, and I have seen that, but these little vignettes from Belfast writers are a fascinating insight into its literary world. I watched them all and particularly enjoyed Michael Longley’s and Ciaran Carson’s, two poets who lived their lives in Belfast. Sinéad Morrisey’s and Leontia Flynn’s also gave a different take on the city and how the next generation feels about it. Patricia Craig, literary critic, marvels at the talent that has come out of the city in her video, but also appreciates that its literary scene and writers must keep looking outward (and maybe even leave at times) to avoid becoming, to use her word, ‘insular’. I don’t come from Belfast; I was born in Crossgar which I like to describe as on the outskirts of the outskirts, a through road to a through road. When I started writing I felt that I should write about Belfast (indeed that I had to, as that’s what all the other Northern Irish poets were writing about), and my first collection shows some signs of these attempts, however Belfast, I’ve come to discover, is simply not my territory and I’m better off writing about the place I know which is County Down. Like any literary scene, I suppose what defines Belfast's and gives it its distinct qualities can also be what holds it back, and there’s always the risk of an echo chamber effect where writers of that time or place are speaking to or across each other, but what struck me about listening to these Belfast writers is that they all seem distinct enough and seemed to find their own ways of navigating the city, and writing their own private Belfasts. That didn't stop me wondering, though, what kind of writers some of them would have been, and what kind of writing they would have written had they left.

Here are two of my highlights from the series:

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