He has won a number of awards, including the 2009 Michael Hartnett Award and the British National Poetry Competition. He was born to an Irish father and a British mother and now lives near Clonakilty in Co. Cork. He studied Classics and English at university then taught English on the island of Crete. Many of the poems of his first collection, A Vision of Comets, published by Anvil Press, take their inspiration from his time on Crete and from the Aegean area.