Seamus Heaney author page

Seamus Heaney biography

Seamus Justin Heaney (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator from Northern Ireland. He was born at Mossbawn, near Castledawson, County Londonderry, the eldest of nine children.

Heaney attended Anahorish Primary School before earning a scholarship to St Columb’s College in Derry. He proceeded to study English Language and Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, graduating with First Class Honours in 1961. After a teacher-training qualification at St Joseph’s College in Belfast, he taught English and later lectured at St Joseph’s.

His first major poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1966. He went on to publish many collections, among them Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, North, Field Work, Station Island, The Spirit Level, Electric Light, District and Circle and Human Chain. In 1999, his translation of Beowulf was published and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Between 1981 and 1997, Heaney held a professorship at Harvard and served as Poet in Residence there. He served as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry from 1989 to 1994. In 2003, the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry was established at Queen’s University Belfast.

Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” He also won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006 for District and Circle.

Seamus Heaney died in Blackrock, Dublin, on 30 August 2013, aged 74.