Seamus Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney (b. April 13 1939) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer from County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he is one of the most widely known and important poets working in English, or perhaps any language, today.

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Seamus Heaney was born, the eldest of nine children, on a farm called Mossbawn, in County Londonderry, thirty miles to the north-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He was brought up a Catholic and a nationalist (and therefore would call his birthplace Derry, not Londonderry). He regards himself as Irish, not British, as he made known publicly when some publication referred to him as "British", due to the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practising for the D-Day landings. The family moved to a bigger farm, at Bellaghy, in 1953. He was educated at the local primary school and St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry to which he was awarded a scholarship. At St Columbs he was taught the Irish language. He then attended Queen's University, Belfast.

1939: 1939 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar)....

Irish: Irish may refer to:...

Poet: Poets are authors of poems, or of other forms of poetry such as dramatic verse. Poets are often regarded as imaginative thinkers or writers. Bad poets are called poetasters....