McCarthy, Thomas, 1954-

Thomas McCarthy is an Irish poet, novelist, literary critic, and librarian whose writings engage with themes of love, family, memory, and 20th century Irish politics. McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, a small town in County Waterford, Ireland, in 1954. He was educated at University College Cork in the 1970s, where he studied with John Montague (1929-2016) and became part of a movement of young poets that included Gregory O'Donoghue, Sean Dunne, William Wall, Maurice Riordan, Gerry Murphy, Greg Delanty, and Theo Dorgan.

McCarthy's published collections of poetry include The First Convention (Dolmen Press, 1978), The Sorrow Garden (Anvil Press 1981), The Non-Aligned Storyteller (Anvil, 1984), Seven Winters in Paris (Anvil Press, 1989), Lost Province (Anvil Press, 1996), Mr. Dineen's Careful Parade (Anvil Press 1999), Merchant Prince (Anvil Press, 2005), The Last Geraldine Officer (Anvil Press, 2009), Pandemonium (Carcanet Press, 2016), and Prophecy (Carcanet Press, 2019). He has also published two novels, Without Power (Poolbeg Press, 1991) and Asya and Christine (Poolbeg Press, 1992); and two works of non-fiction, Gardens of Remembrance (New Island Books, 1996) and Out of the Ashes (Cork City Libraries, 2006). His work has also been published in numerous journals in both Ireland and abroad, and his poems have been featured in dozens of anthologies of Irish poetry, including The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (Penguin, 1991) and An Anthology of Irish Poetry (Harvard University Press, 2013), among others.

McCarthy has been actively involved the Irish poetry community for much of his career, including as a member of Aosdána, the Irish assembly of writers and artists, and as an editor of Poetry Ireland Review (1984-1985) and The Cork Review (1993, 1999-2000). His poetry has garnered the Patrick Kavanagh Award (1977), the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1981), the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award (1984), and the O'Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry (1991). McCarthy has also been an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (1978-1979) and Poet-in-Residence at the American Conference on Irish Studies (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, 2018).

In addition to working for many years as a librarian at Cork City Libraries beginning in 1978, McCarthy has also taught poetry and literature as Humphrey Professor of English at Macalester College in Minnesota from 1994-1995, and led poetry workshops at the Arvon Foundation (Lumb Bank), Listowel Writers' Week, Molly Keane House, and Portlaoise Prison (Provisional IRA Wing). He also served for three years as the assistant director of Cork 2005, the company responsible for managing Cork's designation as a European Capital of Culture.

In 1982, McCarthy married writer and educator Catherine Coakley, with whom he has two children.