His first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998) won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1998, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. The book also gained him the Somerset Maugham Award, and the poem Keith Chegwin as Fleance gained him the Geoffrey Dearmer award.

In 1999 he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. From 2000-2002 He was poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere.

His second collection is The Ice Age (2002), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Writing in Scotland on Sunday, W.N. Herbert described Farley as ‘one of our most engaged and engaging poets. He has the knack of both establishing and undermining the securities of memory purely through turn of phrase.’

In 2004, Paul Farley was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. His latest collection, Tramp in Flames, was published in 2006, a poem from which, ‘Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second’, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem. The same year he also published a study of Terence Davies’s film Distant Voices, Still Lives. He has also written a great deal for radio, including several dramas, and often writes more widely on art and literature.