| Seamus
Heaney was born in 1939, the eldest of nine children, to Margaret
and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm, Mossbawn, about 30 miles
northwest of Belfast in County Derry. He attended the local
school at Anahorish until 1951, then transferred to St. Columb’s
College, a boarding school in Derry. In 1957 he enrolled at
Queen's University, Belfast, where he took a first in English
in 1961. The next year he gained a postgraduate teacher’s
diploma at St. Joseph's College in Belfast, and in 1963 was
appointed as a lecturer in English at the same school.
While at Queen’s
he began to write, publishing work in the university magazines
under the pseudonym Incertus. Later, along with Derek Mahon,
Michael Longley, and others, he joined a poetry workshop under
the guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965, in connection with
the Belfast Festival, he published Eleven Poems. In August
of 1965 he married Marie Devlin. The following year he became
a lecturer in modern English literature at Queen's University,
Belfast, his first son Michael was born, and Faber and Faber
published Death of a Naturalist. This volume earned him
the E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award in 1967, the
Somerset Maugham Award in 1968, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial
Prize, also in 1968. Christopher, his second son, was born in
1968.
His next volume, Door
into the Dark, was published in 1969 and became
the Poetry Book Society Choice for the year. In 1970-71 he was
a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
He returned to Northern Ireland in 1971, and in 1972 he resigned
his lectureship at Queen’s, moved his family to Glanmore,
in County Wicklow, and published Wintering Out. In 1973
his daughter, Catherine Ann, was born. During this year he also
received the Denis Devlin Award and the Writer in Residence
Award from the American Irish Foundation. In 1975 North
was published, winning the E.M. Forster Award and the Duff Cooper
Memorial Prize. During these years at Glanmore, Heaney also
gave many readings in the United States and England and edited
two poetry anthologies.
In 1975 Heaney began teaching
at Carysfort College in Dublin. In 1976 the family moved to
Sandymount, in Dublin, and Heaney became Department Head at
Carysfort. In 1979 he published Field
Work, and in 1980, Selected Poems and
Preoccupations:
Selected Prose. In 1981 he gave up his post at Carysfort
to become a visiting professor at Harvard. In 1982 he won the
Bennett Award, and Queen's University in Belfast conferred on
him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He co-founded Field
Day Publishing with Brian Friel and others in 1983. Station
Island, his first collection in five years, was
published in 1984. During that year he was elected the Boylston
Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, and Open University
awarded him an honorary degree. Also in 1984 his mother, Margaret
Kathleen, died. The
Haw Lantern, published in 1987, contains a brilliant
sonnet sequence memorializing her. Heaney's father, Patrick,
died in 1986 and Heaney's collection, Seeing
Things, published in 1991, contains many poems
for his father. Between 1989 and 1994 Heaney was Professor of
Poetry at Oxford. The lectures he delivered there were published
in 1995 as The Redress of Poetry, which was followed
in 1996 by The Spirit Level, a collection of poems. He
also translated Sophocles Philoctetes which was produced
by Field Day in 1990 under the title The Cure at Troy.
Mr. Heaney is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Writer-in-Residence at
Harvard University
Seamus Heaney was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His most recent publications
include a translation of Beowulf
(2000), Diary
of One Who Vanished (2000), Opened
Ground (1998), and his recent collection of poems,
Electric
Light (2001). His latest collection of essays
is Finders
Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. Additionally,
Mr. Heaney has translated The
Burial at Thebes — a Version of Sophocles' Antigone
(November 2004, FSG). In this new translation, commissioned
by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary,
Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles'
masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.
n May 2006, which was the 40th anniversary of his first collection,
Death of a Naturalist, his newest collection of poetry,
District
and Circle, was published by FSG and went on to win
the T.S. Elliot Prize in Britain.
•••
“Art as the wizardry
of style, on the one hand, and art as the personal and public
expression, on the other. Not many can fuse the two nowadays,
and no one writing in English does so well as Heaney.”
— Los Angeles
Times on Beowulf
“Anyone who reads
poetry has reason to rejoice at living in the age when Seamus
Heaney is writing.”
— The New York
Times Book Review
“Arguably the
finest poet now writing in English.”
— The New York
Times Book Review |
