Chris Arthur

Now living on the east coast of Scotland, Chris Arthur was born in Belfast and grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. For a time, he was warden on a nature reserve beside the shores of Lough Neagh, Ulster’s enigmatic geographical heart and the largest lake in the British Isles. His essays explore aspects of family, place, memory, loss and meaning in a lyrically philosophical way. His first collection, Irish Nocturnes, was published in 1999, his ninth, What is it Like to be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer, in 2024. 

He has held postdoctoral research positions at the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews, and taught for many years at the University of Wales. Chris’s essays and poems have appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and is also frequently mentioned in the ‘Notable Essays’ lists of this annual series. His writing has received various honours, including the Akegarasu Haya Prize, the Monroe K. Spears Essay Prize, and a Theodore Christian Hoepfner award. In 2024 he won the Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize.

Work on a new collection, The Slap and the Salamander, is underway. Like his previous books, this explores the extraordinary dimensions of the ordinary, examining what Alexander Smith calls ‘the infinite suggestiveness of common things’. According to Publishers Weekly, ‘Arthur is proof that the art of the essay is flourishing.’ He hopes they’re right.