A City Imagined is a paean to the city of Belfast and its writers. Written in his highly regarded wry and lyrical style, Dawe's memoir sketches the outlines of his life as he starts to understand the city in which he was born, before embracing some of the local writers whose early work had such an influential part in nudging him in the direction of writing-- poets, in the main, whose first books were read with the enthusiasm of a young man beguiled by the language and music of poetry.

Building on the critical acclaim of In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast and Looking Through You, this third and final volume of the Northern Chronicles trilogy completes a fascinating and rich portrait of the celebrated poet's tangled and ever-evolving relationship with his native city.

Gerald Dawe is a retired Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College. He has published eight collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. His latest poetry collection Mickey Finn's Air was published in 2014; Of War and War's Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing appeared in 2015.