Career
He co-founded and edited the Big Spoon literary arts magazine in the 1990s, was production and arts editor of Fortnight magazine, was a creative writing tutor at (amongst other places) the Crescent Arts Centre for eight years, and was appointed Director of Between The Lincolnshire arts festival for 2004. Mairtín brought "Beat" poet Allen Ginsberg to Belfast in 1993 for two public reading events. Among several trips to the United States of America, in 2001 (as the recipient of an Arts Council Individual Artists’ Award) Mairtín travelled west and met with National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel to research a book of poetry dealing with the concept and implications of space flight.
Some of the resulting poems are published in his (posthumous) Selected Poems.
