Paul Terence Carney lives in Peckham, and has been based there most of his life, aside from his wilderness years in South Devon, playing rhythm guitar (badly) and keyboards (worse) in what may very well have been the West Country’s worst rock band, ever.
Before turning to writing as his main focus, he studied for an MA in Illustration under Janet Woolley at Camberwell College of Arts, graduating in 2009. A career in the weird, fiercely jolly world of children’s book illustration might have beckoned, had not a succession of commissioning editors failed to see the appeal of his detailed diagrams of bird skeletons and suchlike. A brighter future in natural history illustration nosedived shortly after Paul contributed illustrations to HarperCollins’ Beekeeper’s Bible, because by this point his vision had deteriorated to a point where working as a visual artist was no longer a viable option. Evidently, some form of retraining was in order. Paul enrolled in various creative writing classes – including an excellent one run by the Open University – and quickly realised that this was probably what he should have been doing all along.
Initially, he had no notions of writing poetry, which seemed a mysterious and esoteric art-form with baffling, arbitrary rules – a thing to be appreciated rather than attempted.
On the OU course, however (and somewhat to his alarm), poetry was a mandatory component of the syllabus. Confusion arose from the fact that his OU tutors kept giving him higher grades for the poetry assignments than the prose ones.
Paul enrolled for the MA programme in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, where he was taught by such wonderful writers as Stephen Knight, Maura Dooley, Eva Salzman and Francis Spufford. Graduating in 2014, Paul was the winner the Pat Kavanagh Award – presented by United Agents in conjunction with Goldsmiths – in January 2015. His work has been published in Acumen, Verse Kraken, Poetry London and several of Live Canon’s anthologies, and as may be apparent from just about every page of this website, his debut poetry collection, The Empty Horizon, which won Live Canon’s First Collection Competition in 2015, was published in August 2017.
Paul (right) at the Goldsmiths Graduation Ceremony with brilliant fellow graduate Derek Adams (middle) and wonderful tutor and famous poet Maura Dooley (left)