A City Imagined is in praise of the city of Belfast. With a clear eye on the truths that history has demonstrated of the northern capital’s sectarian and violent past, the memoir opens in the seemingly stable world of the 1950s, with Dawe enraptured by his mother’s storytelling, which hinted at previous lives lived.

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: Northern Chronicles, 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.