Mahon was born the only child of Ulster Protestant working class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland and Wolff while his mother worked at a local Flax Mill. During his childhood, he claims he was something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attended Skegoneil Primary school and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. At Inst he encountered fellow students who shared his interest in literature and poetry. The school produced a magazine to which Mahon produced some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton his early poems were highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young.

Mahon pursued third level studies at Trinity College, Dublin where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He started to mature as a poet. He left Trinity in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966 he worked his way through Canada and the United States. In 1967 he published his first collection of poems Night Crossing. He taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a free lance journalist. He currently lives in Kinsale, Co. Cork. On 23 March. 2007 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Thoroughly educated and with a keen understanding of literary tradition, Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. In an era of free verse, Mahon has often written in received forms, using a broadly applied version of iambic pentameter that, metrically, resembles the "sprung foot" verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some poems rhyme. Even the Irish landscape itself is never all that far from the classical tradition, as in his poem "Achill":

Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water

:And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art

And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover,

:Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.

He has also explored the genre of ekphrasis: the poetic reinterpretation of visual art. In that respect he has been interested in 17th century Dutch and Flemish art.

Mahon has been cited as a major influence by a number of Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and Eamon Grennan.

Poetry

• 1965: Twelve Poems. Festival Publications, Belfast
• 1968: Night-Crossing. Oxford University Press
• 1970: Ecclesiastes Phoenix Pamphlet Poets
• 1970: Beyond Howth Head. Dolmen Press
• 1972: Lives. Oxford University Press
• 1975: The Snow Party. Oxford University Press
• 1977: In Their Element. Arts Council of Northern Ireland
• 1979: Poems 1962-1978. Oxford University Press
• 1981: Courtyards in Delft. Gallery Press
• 1982: The Hunt By Night. Oxford University Press
• 1985: Antarctica. Gallery Press
• 1990: The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush: Selected Poems. Gallery Press
• 1991: Selected Poems. Viking
• 1992: The Yaddo Letter. Gallery Press
• 1995: The Hudson Letter. Gallery Press
• 1997: The Yellow Book. Gallery Press
• 1999: Collected Poems. Gallery Press
• 2001: Selected Poems. Penguin
• 2005: Harbour Lights. Gallery Press (winner of the 2006 Irish Times Poetry Now Award)
• 2007: Somewhere the Wave. Gallery Press
• 2008: Life on Earth. Gallery Press (shortlisted for the 2009 International Griffin Poetry Prize; winner of the 2009 Irish Times Poetry Now Award)
• 2010: An Autumn Wind. Gallery Press

Translations

• 1982: The Chimeras (a version of Les Chimères, by Nerval), Gallery Press
• 1985: High Time (a version of Molière's A School for Husbands), Gallery Press
• 1988: The Selected Poems of Philippe Jaccottet, Viking, 1988.
• 1996: The Bacchae of Euripedes, and Racine's Phaedra, Gallery Press
• 2002: Birds (a version of Oiseaux, by Saint-John Perse), Gallery Press
• 2004: Cyrano de Bergerac. (A version of the play by Edmond Rostand), Gallery Press
• 2005: Oedipus (A conflation of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus), Gallery Press
• 2006: Adaptations (A collection of versions, rather than translations proper, from poets such as Pasolini, Juvenal, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Valéry, Baudelaire, Rilke and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill), Gallery Press

Prose

• 1996: Journalism: selected prose, 1970-1995. Ed. Terence Brown. Gallery Press

Allen Randolph, Jody. Derek Mahon: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Irish University Review: Special Issue: Derek Mahon 24.1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 131-156.

Haughton, Hugh. The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.