Seán Haldane held three passports: British (he was born in Sussex, in 1943), Irish (through his father, and he grew up mainly in Northern Ireland), and Canadian (through a long period of residence, 1967-94, in Québec, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia). By ancestry he was something of a human compass: a quarter each English, German, Scottish and Irish. He passed away on 27 March 2023 in London, UK.
He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, University College, Oxford (B.A., First Class Hons. in English) and Saybrook Institute, San Francisco (Ph.D. in Psychology). When he first found himself writing poetry he resolved never to make a living from it or by teaching it, and that any incidental earnings from poems would go towards publishing poetry by himself and others. He worked as a lecturer, part-time farmer, small press publisher, psychotherapist, and as a consultant clinical neuropsychologist in the Canadian health services and the NHS, as well as an expert witness in criminal and civil cases.
Within a few years of his retirement from working for the NHS (1995-2012), he shared his time between London and Canada. In 2013 he founded Rún Press Ltd (Ireland), now Rune Press Ltd (UK) where he was Co-Director.
Apart from published collections of his own poems, Seán wrote essays and reviews on poetry for various literary magazines and periodicals. He also authored books on literary studies, psychotherapy and neuroscience and worked on a series of historical crime novels. The first two, The Devil’s Making (2013, winner of the 2014 Canadian Arthur Ellis Award) and An Evil Tale I Heard (2022), are available through Rune Press and distributed by Guernica Editions and Gazelle Book Services (see also PUBLICATIONS on this website). Seán was a member of the Crime Writers of Canada and the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain.