Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born at Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland in 1939 and educated at Queen’s University Belfast. His first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Cholmondeley Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. Subsequent award-winning volumes include North (1975), Station Island (1984), Seeing Things (1991) and The Spirit Level (1996); Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 appeared in 1998. His most recent collection, District and Circle (2006) received the T.S. Eliot Award. His prose collections include Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (1980), The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995). He has written two plays, The Cure at Troy (1990, a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and The Burial at Thebes (2004, a version of Sophocles’ Antigone). Among his translations are Sweeney Astray (1983; from the twelfth-century Irish, Buile Suibhne) and Beowulf (2000), which received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. He has held teaching positions in Ireland and the United States, including the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. He holds the rank of Saoi in Aosdána. Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.