[2] James Harpur was born in Britain in 1956 to an Irish father and a British mother and now lives near Clonakilty in County Cork.
[6] In 1995 he won the UK National Poetry Competition with a sonnet sequence, ‘The Frame of Furnace Light’, about the death of his father.
[2] Further books include The White Silhouette (2018), described by the Irish Times as a ‘resonant, moving pilgrimage of great beauty’,[9] and The Examined Life (2021), described by Stephen Fry as a ‘quite marvellous work … an Odyssey, a Ulysses shaken up in the snow-dome of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’[10] In 2021 Harpur published his first novel, The Pathless Country, winner of the J.G.
[3] According to the introduction to Harpur on the Poetry International website, he ‘is essentially an interior poet with a fascination for spirituality, and his poems are full of references to Christian as well as to other religious traditions.
Stylistically, he has a deep sympathy with the mythopoeic strand of poetry, from Homer, Virgil and Dante to the Romantics and Yeats, Eliot and Ted Hughes.