Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

• Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 at Mossbawn and raised in Northern Ireland.

• He is an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer.

• He is one of the most popular poets writing in English today, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

• He enrolled at Queen's College in Belfast and took a first in English in 1961. 

• In 1963, he became a lecturer in English, at St. Joseph's College.

• Quickly, he began to write and joined a poetry workshop and published his work in university magazines.

• Most of his poetry deals with its culture and landscape.

• Northern Ireland has been the theatre of a civil war, and Heaney's poetry recalls the desolation and loss this conflict has entailed.

• He tries to make language and memory echo and his poems thus underline the importance of literature in the making of history.

• Heaney's poems continually waver between two attitudes: strongly confronting the situation in his homeland, or remaining remote from it.

• In 1978, a friend of his was killed by a bomb left by the IRA in a protestant pub; in order to transcribe his reactions to such an event, he wrote a poem entitled Casualty.

• Main books by Seamus Heaney:

1. Death of a Naturalist, 1966 
2. Door into the Dark, 1969
3. Wintering Out, 1972
4. Stations, 1975
5. North, 1975
6. Field Work, 1979
7. Sweeney Astray, 1983
8. Station Island, 1984
9. Haw Lantern, 1987
10. The Redress of Poetry, 1995