Paul Jeffcutt is a writer who lives in Co. Down, Northern Ireland.
Paul has won thirty-three awards for poetry in national and international competitions in Ireland, the UK and the USA.
His poems have been published in literary journals in Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, the UK and the USA.
Paul’s third collection of poetry, True, is published by Black Spring Press in 2024. All of the poems in the book are inspired by real-life stories that Paul encountered in news reports, exhibitions, diaries, brochures, sagas, public notices, journals, broadcasts, obituaries and by word of mouth. They are not ‘found poems’. The real-life story has instead provided a launch point for the poem. Ciaran Carson christened them ‘discovered poems’. True brings together Paul’s discovered poems and is dedicated to the late Ciaran Carson, founding Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast.
Paul Jeffcutt’s poetry has always been tempted by the coincidental and the accidental, finding strange wonders in juxtaposition and enigma. With ‘True’, this risk-taking reaches a new stage of fluency, insight and daring. Along the pathways of these literally ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ poems, the big themes are explored, in the company of other artists, pioneers, adventurers and plain folk like ourselves. Throughout, the poems cling to perilous supports, delivering messages from this one fragile life across “a lucent tightrope of guile,/balance and pixie dust./On fire, but not burnt.” A joy to read. ―Damian Smyth
Paul's second poetry collection, The Skylark’s Call, was published by Dempsey & Windle in November 2020. The theme of the book is the vitality and vulnerability of everyday life. All of the poems were written during his years of treatment for, and recovery from, advanced cancer. The poems reflect on the memories and meanings that surround this complex borderland.
Paul Jeffcutt proves himself to be a poet at ease with subjects that so many make a mess of. All the human condition, in its glorious difficulty, is here: the spiritual, the erotic, cancer, politics and history. But the making of these poems is his unshowy expertise with language. It is only a matter of time before he acquires the readership that poetry such as this ultimately insists on. ―Kevin Higgins
Paul is an acclaimed reader and performer of his work, featuring four times on BBC Radio and regularly appearing at arts festivals in the UK and Ireland. In 2018 he was invited to read in the Scottish Poetry Library at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
His debut collection, Latch, published by Lagan Press in 2010, was chosen as The Book of the Month by The Ulster Tatler, who considered it ‘a wonderful collection from a very talented poet. The tone is confident and assured, the content is thought-provoking and, as a whole, it stokes passion and emotion within the reader.’
In 2011, Paul began a weekly blog, Writing to Survive, about his cancer treatment and living with the threat of recurrence. The blog has garnered many plaudits and has hundreds of regular readers.
He is an Emeritus Professor of Queen’s University, Belfast, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
