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Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. His debut collection of poetry, More Sky, won an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Early life and education
Carrick-Varty was born in Oxford in 1993 to parents of mixed Irish, German and British descent. He attended The Cherwell School before moving to Manchester in 2013 to begin an undergraduate degree in English Literature with Creative Writing at The University of Manchester, where he would graduate with first class class honors in 2016. In 2018, he completed a Masters in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester, graduating with a Distinction.

Career
In 2019, Carrick-Varty won the New Poets Prize, judged by Kayo Chingonyi. Of Carrick-Varty's work, Chingonyi said: "The syntactical precision here demonstrates a care and attention to the weight and balance of each line that is laudable but when wedded to feeling, as it is here, technical excellence rises above mere flair in to something very special." Carrick-Varty's debut poetry pamphlet Somewhere Far was published in June 2019, about which one reviewer wrote: "What is immediately striking in these poems is the consistency of tone. It’s as though the poems have been allowed sufficient time in each other’s company so that they echo, reflect and expand their over-arching theme – a personal sense of distance and loss." A second pamphlet, 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father, – mapping "a banal landscape of suburban childhood" – followed in 2020.

In 2022, Carrick-Varty won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for 'sky doc', an extract of his unreleased debut book of poetry, More Sky. The award, given to poets under the age of 30 for a collection of poems, was "founded in 1960 by the late Dr Eric Gregory for the encouragement of young poets." The judges, Raymond Antrobus, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Sarah Howe, Gwyneth Lewis, Roger Robinson, and Joelle Taylor, said of Carrick-Varty's work: "sky doc is a compact, complex lyric work that bravely weaves suicidal ideation, family history, education and British class tensions throughout."

Carrick-Varty's debut book of poetry, More Sky, was published by Carcanet Press in January 2023. Of the book, author Jeanette Winterson said: "These poems make up a memory system. Each by each, they recover a father-son journey through drink and time." Jessica Traynor, writing in The Irish Times said: "These sparsely written, surreal poems address class, domesticity and cycles of violence with a lightness of touch that allows them to strike surprise blows to the solar plexus."

More Sky would go on to be shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize. It would just one of two debuts to appear on the ten-book shortlist of best poetry books published in Britain and Ireland in 2023. Paul Muldoon, Chair of the Judging Panel, said: "All these poets properly reflect that disruption [of their present moment]. Shot through as they are with images of grief, migration, and conflict, they are nonetheless imbued with energy and joy." The book would later be named a The Irish Times Book of the Year.

In 2023, along with novelist Adelle Stripe, Carrick-Varty was named Anthony Burgess Fellow in Creative Writing at The University of Manchester. The fellowship, offered annualy by the Centre for New Writing, is designed to introduce "new, published writers to each year’s new Creative Writing MA cohort."

bath magg
Carrick-Varty is founding editor of the online poetry magazine bath magg. Between 2020 and 2023 he edited bath magg with fellow poet Gboyega Odubanjo, who went missing, and was subsequently found dead, at Shambala Festival in 2023.

Books

 * More Sky (Carcanet Press, 2023) ISBN 9781800173019

Pamphlets

 * Somewhere Far (Smith|Doorstop, 2019) ISBN 9781912196692
 * 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020) ISBN 9781838021153

Poems

 * "Fossil", The Stockholm Review of Literature, May 2017
 * "I KNOW", The High window, June 2017
 * "Drowning in Wembley Stadium", The Poetry Shed, October 2017
 * "Tree Shaping" and "Slow Birds", And Other Poems, January 2018
 * "Eagly River, 2017" and "Four Words", The Manchester Review, February 2019
 * "Lop Nur", "Moonless June" and "When you lean close and tell me", PN Review, May 2019
 * "Six Lies" and "All the Devil's Mess", The Scores, January 2020
 * "And God said", The New Statesman, January 2020
 * "Withdrawal", The Interpreter's House, February 2020
 * "A week and not a word since the argument", RTÉ, May 2020
 * "Dear Postie", The New Statesman, July 2020
 * "The Father Heavens", PN Review, September 2020
 * "Gucci Mane", "From Ryan Gosling" and "From the Perspective of Coral", The Manchester Review, November 2021
 * "From sky doc", Granta, November 2022
 * "From sky doc", Anthropocene, November 2022
 * "From sky doc", PN Review, November 2022
 * "From sky doc", Anthropocene, January 2022
 * "From sky doc", Poetry, February 2022
 * "Home Alone Trying Not to Eat", Bad Lilies, June 2023

Awards

 * New Poets Prize, 2019
 * Eric Gregory Award, 2022
 * T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist, 2023