Seamus Heaney

Nobel Prize-winning poet and writer

Seamus Heaney is a Nobel Prize-winning poet and writer. Born in Northern Ireland in 1939, he studied English Language and Literature at Queen's University, Belfast, graduating with first class honours in 1961. Soon after, he became a lecturer at St. Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast and joined the Belfast Group of Poets established by Philip Hobsbaum. Heaney published his first book, Eleven Poems, in 1965, and two years later Faber published his first major volume, Death of a Naturalist. He was appointed lecturer in Modern English at Queen's University Belfast in 1966, went on to lecture at the University of California, Berkeley and Carysfort College in Dublin, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford for five years from 1989.

Heaney has published eleven poetry collections in total, including Field Work (1979), The Haw Lantern (1987), and The Spirit Level (1996), plus several collected editions. He has also produced several translations, including versions of Beowulf (1999) and Pushkin's Arion (2002). He won the T S Eliot prize in 2006 for his volume of poetry District & Circle, and was the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.