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.

Life

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.

Related Topics:
Belfast - Catholic - British - Northern Ireland - D-Day - Bellaghy - 1953 - St. Columb's College - Derry - Irish language - Queen's University, Belfast

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In the 1960s, Heaney trained as a teacher and taught in St. Thomas's Secondary School in the deprived, militantly anti-British Ballymurphy neighborhood of West Belfast. The headmaster of this school was the writer Michael MacLaverty from County Monaghan, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. His first book, 'Eleven ]s', was published in 1965 for The Queen's University Festival. A year later, Faber and Faber published a full collection called 'Death of a Naturalist'. This collection met with much critical acclaim. In 1965 he met and married Marie Devlin. (Devlin is a writer herself and in 1994 published Over Nine Waves a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) They had three children.

Related Topics:
1960s - Michael MacLaverty - County Monaghan - Patrick Kavanagh - 1962 - 1965 - Queen's University - Faber and Faber - Marie Devlin - 1994

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Throughout the 1960s, he was working, at formal meetings, with a number of writers including Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Philip Hobsbaum. In the 1970s, younger poets attended these meetings, now run by Heaney, including Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby. In 1968, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called 'Room to Rhyme'; this led to quite a lot of exposure for the poet's work. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. He became an elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1972, Heaney left his lectureship at Belfast and moved to the Republic, working as a teacher at Carysfort College in Dublin. In 1984, Heaney was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. In 1989, he was elected to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, which he held for a five-year term to 1994 (not requiring residence in Oxford). Every other holder of this post had been British, although one of his successors, Paul Muldoon, is a Northern Irish poet.

Related Topics:
Michael Longley - Derek Mahon - Philip Hobsbaum - 1970s - Paul Muldoon - Frank Ormsby - 1968 - Arts Council - Republic of Ireland - 1974 - Saoi - Aosdána - 1972 - Belfast - Republic - Carysfort College - Dublin - 1984 - Harvard University - Professor of Poetry - Oxford University

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Throughout this time he was publishing prolifically and dividing his time between Ireland and America. He also continued to give public readings, which were very popular. So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed 'Heaneyboppers' suggesting an almost pop-music fanaticism on the part of his supporters.

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He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. In 1997, his collection, The Spirit Level won The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, a feat repeated in 2000 by his translation of the epic Beowulf.

Related Topics:
Nobel Prize in Literature - 1995 - 1997 - Beowulf

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