Biography of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He grew up in the country, on a farm, in touch with a traditional rural way of life, which he wrote about in his first book Death of a Naturalist (1966). He attended the local school and in 1951 went as a boarder to St Columb's College, about 40 miles away in Derry (the poem 'Singing School' in North refers to this period of his life). In 1956 he went on a scholarship to Queen's University, Belfast and graduated with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1961. After a year as a post-graduate at a college of education, and a year teaching in a secondary modern school in Ballymurphy, he was appointed to the staff of St Joseph's College of Education. In 1966 Seamus Heaney took up a lecturing post in the English Department of Queen's University, and remained there until 1972, spending the academic year 1970-71 as a visiting Professor at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1972 Seamus Heaney stopped teaching in order to devote more time to his writing, and moved with his family to Glanmore in County Wicklow, and later to Dublin. For three years he made his living as a freelance writer, presenting a radio programme for RTE and doing occasional work for the BBC and for various journals. During this period he produced the poems collected in North (1975). In September 1975 he resumed his teaching, this time at Carysfort College in Dublin. Seamus Heaney began to write in 1962, publishing first in Irish magazines. During the early and mid-sixties, he was connected with a group of writers in Belfast that included Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and James Simmons. Philip Hobsbaum ran a poetry group during these years and the poets met regularly at his house until he moved to Glasgow in 1966. After this, the meetings continued under Heaney's chairmanship until 1970, and in this later period were attended by younger poets such as Paul Muldoon, Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley. In 1968, with Michael Longley and the singer David Hammond, Seamus Heaney took part in a two-week reading tour of Northern Ireland called 'Room to Rhyme', the first in a series of such literary enterprises sponsored by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974 and served until 1979. He is a member of Aosdana. Seamus Heaney has won numerous awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (1968), the Denis Devlin Award (1973), the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize (1975), the American Irish Foundation Literary Award (1973) and the WHSmith Annual Award (1976). In 1987 he was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Award for The Haw Lantern. In 1965 he married Marie Devlin and they have three children. He is currently the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet-in-Residence at Harvard University where he goes to teach for 6 weeks every two years. From 1989 to 1994 Seamus Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. A collection of his Oxford Poetry Lectures entitled The Redress of Poetry was published by Faber and Faber in September 1995. November 1995 saw the publication of his co-translation of Laments, a moving Polish Classic of the sixteenth century by Jan Kochanowski. The Spirit Level, his first new collection of poems for five years, was published in May 1996. In 1997 The School Bag was published, a companion volume to The Rattle Bag, co-edited with Ted Hughes. 1999 saw the publication of his translation of Beowulf, which went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. His most recent collection of poetry, Electric Light, was published by Faber in April 2001. In 2002, Faber published a selection of his prose, Finders Keepers. In October 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.