If you’re visiting Northern Ireland, your background reading should include the work of Ciaran Carson, who died today of cancer at the age of 70. He was a wonderful chronicler of what he called “the ongoing, fractious epic that is Belfast”.

  He grew up in the Catholic Falls Road area and, as Patricia Craig puts it in her obituary for The Guardian, “went on to transfigure his native city, and transfix his readers, with a rich accumulation of poems, metafictions and other unclassifiable prose works”.

  I’d long loved the work, and was lucky enough to meet the man when I wrote a piece about a new literary tour of Belfast in 2006 (can it really be that long ago?). I’d brought with me two paperbacks that I wanted him to sign: a poetry collection, The Ballad of HMS Belfast, and The Star Factory, which is partly autobiography and partly biography of Belfast. I muttered something about how they were only paperbacks, and he lifted, signed and then handed to me a hardback of The Star Factory. “Take that with you as well,” he said.