Seamus Heaney

Born near Castledawson, Co. Derry, Seamus Heaney grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland. A graduate of Queen's University, Belfast, he emerged as a poet while working as a teacher in the mid-1960s. Heaney's poetry collections include: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door Into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, Seeing Things (1991), Electric Light (2001) and District and Circle (2006). The Spirit Level (1996) and his translation of Beowulf (1999) both won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Heaney has published several works of prose and criticism, including Preoccupations (1980), The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995). These writings as well as his poetry are informed by a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in a world where tensions between a poet and his birthplace are inherited and established. Heaney has also translated two classic plays, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (1990) and The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone (2005), and co-edited two selections of poetry with Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School Bag (1997). Heaney taught English and poetry at Queen's University and at Harvard University, and was professor of poetry at Oxford University from 1989 to 1994. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and he was made Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture the following year. Heaney was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1997. Seamus Heaney passed away on 30 August 2013.