Dr Carlo Gébler

Teaching and Research Interests

Carlo Gébler was educated at the University of York and the National Film & Television School.  His first publication was the novel The Eleventh Summer (1985). Since then he has published more novels along with short stories, plays, memoirs, essays, reviews, biographies and works of narrative history.  His most recent publications include The Projectionist (biography, 2015), The Wing Orderly’s Tales (short stories, 2016), The Innocent of Falkland Road (novel, 2017), Aesop’s Fables, the Cruelty of the Gods (a new version of Aesop’s fables, with illustrations by Gavin Weston, 2019), Folktales of Fermanagh (all the materials in this collection were taken from the National Folklore Commission and re-told in collaboration with Séamas Mac Annaidh, 2020), I, Antigone (novel, 2021) which purports to be Antigone’s biography of her father, Oedipus, and A Cold Eye, Notes from a Shared Island 1989 – 2024 (memoir, 2024). 

Alongside working as a writer, Carlo Gébler has also worked as an occasional director and writer of films for television (his documentary Put to the Test won the 1998 Royal Television Society award for best regional documentary), a broadcaster  (most recently he wrote and presented Escape from the Maze (BBC Radio 3, 2024) a ten-part series about the 1983 IRA escape from HMP Maze/Long Kesh), and a prison teacher. In the early 1990s he was a part-time creative writing tutor in HMP Maze and from 1997 to 2015 he was writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry.
He currently works with prisoners in bail hostels in Belfast and long-term female prisoners in Hydebank College (formerly Hydebank Young Offenders’ Centre). He was elected to Aosdána in 1990.

Carlo Gébler has contributed to the creative writing programme at the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for many years and currently teaches the ‘Writing for a Living’ course there.