He then attended St. Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School before proceeding to Queen's University, Belfast (QUB) to read for a degree in English.
[3] In 1998 he was appointed a Professor of English at QUB where he established and was the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
His novel Shamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present in Jan van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage.
[6] Two months before he died he published Claude Monet, "The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil", 1880 in The New Yorker.
As Carol Rumens pointed out 'Before the 1987 publication of The Irish for No, Carson was a quiet, solid worker in the groves of Heaney.
But at that point, he rebelled into language, set free by a rangy "long line" that was attributed variously to the influence of C. K. Williams, Louis MacNeice and traditional music'.
[8] In the ten years before The Irish for No (1987) he perfected a new style which effected a unique fusion of traditional storytelling with postmodernist devices.
The poem begins in shabby bucolic: It takes five pages to get to Dresden, the protagonist having joined the RAF as an escape from rural and then urban poverty.
Carson was deeply influenced by Louis MacNeice and he included a poem called 'Bagpipe Music'.
[9][10] In 2020, the Seamus Heaney Centre established two annual fellowships in memory of its first director, Ciaran Carson, and inspired by his writing about the city of Belfast in prose as well as poetry.