Garrett Carr

My latest book is a novel called The Boy from the Sea. It was published by Picador in February 2025 and has received a lot of attention. Numerous reviews, in most major UK and Ireland newspapers as well in the press across Europe and in the United States, where it even featured in People Magazine, with circulation of over 2,500,000. It was the subject of a billboard campaign in Germany, shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year Award and named a Best Book of 2025 by the Sunday Times. It was also adapted for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime slot and lead many other writing comissions, such as an article for Dua Lipa’s culture website Service95. The Boy from the Sea is being published in fourteen lanuages. 

Reviews include: “Poignantly paints the struggles of marriage, caregiving, grief and financial worry” – Financial Times. “A novel that is warm, full of lightly worn wisdom and wit. It is a joy" – Sunday Times. “An enticing panorama of a small Irish fishing village transformed by the discovery of an infant … Readers will be hooked” – Publishers Weekly (USA). “Wry, observant, various and thoughtful, a book that gathers momentum like a westerly, the crash of consequences giving way to a late calm, the reader left with a stunned impression of the storm that just blew over” – Irish Times. “Poignant and humane, this work expertly depicts a close-knit community” – Economist. "Carr’s story is both expansive and intimate, funny and warm, while also psychologically acute. And it carries a cargo hold full of feeling beneath the decks. The result is immersive in the best way" – The Herald (Scotland). “Carr’s beautiful and beguiling debut offers many delights. The characters live and breathe on the page” – Minnesota Star Tribune. “In the difficulty of these characters’ lives is a sense of real connection that gives the book a kind of lightness … This is a surprising, tender and warm-hearted novel about a real place and real people” – The Guardian. “Best New Books: Lovely, resonant … about fate, fortune, community and the hard realities of parenting” – People Magazine (USA).

The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border (Faber & Faber, 2017) was also widely and positively reviewed and has gained significant media attention. In the Guardian Colm Tóibín called the book, “Great writing about landscape and history”. While in the Daily Telegraph Micheal Kerr said, "It is Carr's contention that Ireland is more divided than any of us suspected — not in two but in three: north, south and borderland. The third state is opened up in this marvellous book"

This book and my curatorial roles form the basis of my Impact Case Study for REF 2021; ‘Politics, Landscape and Identity on Ireland’s Border’. I am currently developing impact projects for the next REF. 

Borderculture.net was developed with funding from the Higher Education Authority’s North-South Research Programme 2021, a collaborative scheme arising from the government’s Shared Island Initiative. Co-PIs, Prof. Eve Patton from Trinity College Dublin and myself for QUB, were awarded funding and then brought on two post-doc researchers, Dr Orla Fitzpatrick (based in Dublin) and Dr Aisling Reid (based in Belfast). Until borderculture.net there was no single documented resource outlining the border's creative output, despite the substantial and diverse body of primary material and despite the value and potential interest in such an archive for local, national and international audiences. We designed borderculture.net in line with Shared Island initiatives to appeal to educators, at both secondary and third level, students, cultural historians and policy-makers as well as members of the public at home and abroad. We aimed for our initiative to be sustainable, and continue to act as an authority and point of reference in future discussions of border culture. Public impact was achieved through public events, discussions, two exhibitions and a collaboration with the Imagine Belfast Festival 2025, and through attracting coverage from the media. Borderculture.net has reached a broad audience, stimulating engagement, dialogue and further research on the cultural life of Ireland’s border.

I have made three commissioned programmes for BBC Radio 4 and presented the Book Programme for RTE (Ireland). I am a frequent contributor to the press, the BBC and to other newspapers and broadcasters across the anglophile world, for example the New York Times, the Guardian and the Economist. In addition I have presented many papers to academic conferences, primarily on the topics of cartography and writing about place.

I have a background in visual art and this remains part of my research. I make maps that I exhibit widely and have been selected for inclusion in government and university collections. I also curate a touring exhibition called Mapping Alternative Ulster, funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. It is an exhibition of maps created by independent cartographers and has received wide media attention. It first ran in Belfast’s Ulster Museum in 2015 and its last run was in Donegal’s Regional Cultural Centre in 2022. One visitor called it, “A striking exhibition – provoking new insights.” Another remarked that it, “made me proud to live here and made me want to draw a map.” I was also the curator of a group exhibition called Frontier Work, a group show of visual art that ran in Donegal’s Regional Cultural Centre in 2022.

Hundreds of statements about life on Ireland's border were written during the Border People's Parliament in 2018, when 150 border residents met at Northern Ireland's Parliament Buildings, an event commissioned by 14-18 NOW and the Belfast International Arts Festival. One of my roles was to draft a border manifesto from the written statements. The manifesto has been exhibited in Düsseldorf's Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2021), Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery and Manchester's Whitworth Gallery (2022). The manifesto, according to one commentator, is a “Poetry of reasonable voices”.

I am an external REF reivewer for Falmouth University. 

The Boy from the Sea (Picador 2025) was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year Award. The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border (Faber & Faber, 2017) was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award. It lead to my inclusion in a showcase of ten writers ‘asking the questions that will shape our future’, an initiative of the National Centre for Writing, the British Council and the Arts Council. One of my children’s books, The Badness of Ballydog, was nominated for the UK Literary Association Children’s Book Award and the Lincolnshire Young Reader’s Award.

I teach and co-convene our MA in Creative Writing and supervise Stage Three Creative Writing student wishing to write a year-long Prose Dissertation.

Currently, I am primary supervisor to two students undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing, both of whom gained significant funding awards from external bodies. Former supervisee Christina Collins published her PhD novel After Zero (Sourcebooks, 2018) and was contracted for another book. Patricia Forde wrote that the novel is “an eloquent journey through the pain of growing up, this tender and truthful book stays with you long after the words have gone.” Louise Kennedy’s PhD short stories went into a collection called The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (Bloomsbury, 2021). Annie Enright wrote that Kennedy's “prose is so alive, I am surprised that the book stays shut when you close it. These stories breathe, talk, kick-up: they have a pulse”. 

I am an external examiner for Swansea University. 

I was appointed Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen's in 2015 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2019. I teach creative writing across both undergraduate and postgraduate curricula with focus on prose fiction and non-fiction. My research interests include writing about place, history, memoir and the conbination of text and image. I am also a mapmaker and publish academically on the topic of cartography. I hold post-graduate qualifications in Art History, Geography and a PhD in Creative Writing.