Mahon was born the only child of Ulster Protestant working-class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland and Wolff while his mother worked at a local flax mill. During his childhood, he claims he was something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attended Skegoneill Primary school and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. At Inst he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine to which Mahon produced some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton his early poems were highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College, Dublin where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He started to mature as a poet. He left Trinity in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966 he worked his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he published his first collection of poems Night Crossing. He later taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a freelance journalist. He currently lives in Kinsale, Co. Cork. On 23 March. 2007 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He won the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection. At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon has described himself as, an ‘aesthete’ with a penchant ‘for left-wingery to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.’
Style
Thoroughly educated and with a keen understanding of literary tradition, Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. In an era of free verse, Mahon has often written in received forms, using a broadly applied version of iambic pentameter that, metrically, resembles the "sprung foot" verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some poems rhyme. Even the Irish landscape itself is never all that far from the classical tradition, as in his poem "Achill": He has also explored the genre of ekphrasis: the poetic reinterpretation of visual art. In that respect he has been interested in 17th century Dutch and Flemish art.
Poetry
Collections
1965: Twelve Poems. Festival Publications, Belfast
In 2001 NUI Galway awarded an honorary doctorate to Derek for his work reflecting the enduring aesthetic of achievement in contemporary Irish writing. In 1995, Trinity College Dublin awarded him with an honorary doctorate.
