Edna Longley

Edna Longley was born in Dublin in 1940 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She taught for many years in the School of English at Queen’s University, Belfast, where she is now Professor Emerita. A leading critic of modern poetry, she has written on W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Edward Thomas and the Great War poets. Her criticism of Northern Irish poetry is contained in Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream (1994) and Poetry and Posterity (2000). Her other publications include Louis MacNeice: A Study (1989), and she has edited The Bloodaxe Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland (2000). Professor Longley is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy, and is also a member of the Associated Staff of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University.