Born in Newry, Northern Ireland, and currently based in London, James Conor Patterson is a poet, writer and editor whose journalism and non-fiction work has been widely published in publications including The Guardian, i-D and The Irish Times. In 2022, he was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry.
As a poet, Patterson won an Eric Gregory Award for bandit country in 2019 and fragments and versions of the poems appeared in publications including Magma, The Moth, New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Poetry Review.
A selection of his poems was recently shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize. Bandit country, Patterson’s debut collection, is written in the very particular dialect of the Irish border. Characters both mythic and real are threaded through the poems, in this haunting exploration of a place and its people, and the ever-looming presence of political boundaries (Southbank Centre 2023).