Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet from Oxford, England. His debut collection More Sky (2023) was shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize. His pamphlet Somewhere Far (2019) won The Poetry Business's New Poets Prize.
In 2022, Carrick-Varty received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and in 2023 he was named Anthony Burgess Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. His collection Before Violence (2026) was selected as a Poetry Book Society spring recommendation.
Carrick-Varty was born in 1993. He holds a BA in English Literature/Creative Writing and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. He is a co-founding editor of online poetry magazine bath magg and a book reviewer for P.N. Review.
In 2019, Carrick-Varty founded bath magg, which published work by poets including Bhanu Kapil, Vona Groarke, Kim Addonizio, and Ilya Kaminsky. In August 2023, the magazine entered a hiatus following the death of poet Gboyega Odubanjo at Shambala Festival. Carrick-Varty later wrote an essay remembering Odubanjo for Poetry Foundation, stating: âÂÂWhen a person dies, especially so young, theyâÂÂre often mythologized ⦠but I donâÂÂt want to mythologize GboyegaâÂÂs life, because he was my friend; he was so much more than a poet.âÂÂ
His first book, More Sky, was named one of the best new poetry collections of 2023 by The Irish Times and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. It was later shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in 2025.
Carrick-Varty's poems have appeared in Granta, the New Statesman, Poetry Review and Poetry Ireland Review.