bandit country

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022bandit country, the much-anticipated debut collection from James Conor Patterson, is a rollicking, hyper-literate and at times deeply troubling account of a young man’s navigation of the semi-lawless borderlands between the north of Ireland and the Republic – the ‘bandit country’ of the Troubles – and the criss-crossed sea border to England and beyond. Patterson shows us how the militarised boundary line of old has morphed into an invisible and semi-wild frontier, where the ghosts of a thirty-year war continue to haunt the ‘ceasefire generation’.Patterson writes in a hybrid dialect of Newry street and Scots and Irish-inflected English – and in a virtuosic variety of forms: these poems crackle with vernacular wit and the rhythms of everyday speech, absorbing the influence of the poet’s Belfast mentor, Ciaran Carson, and the radical poetics of Tom Leonard. Already a rising star and Eric Gregory award-winner, James Conor Patterson is an extraordinary talent at the forefront of a new wave of poets exploring the linguistic inheritance of region and community.

James Patterson is from Newry, north of Ireland. He won an Eric Gregory Award for bandit country in 2019 and fragments and versions of these poems have appeared in such publications as Magma, The Moth, New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry London and The Tangerine. A selection of James’ poems was recently shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize. His journalism and non-fiction have been published in The Guardian, i-D and The Irish Times among others. He is editor of the forthcoming anthology The New Frontier: Writing from the Irish Border, which New Island are publishing in October. He currently lives in London.