Seamus Heaney

Who was Seamus Heaney?

Seamus Justin Heaney (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. Heaney was born in the townland of Tamniaran, near Castledawson, Northern Ireland. His family moved to nearby Bellaghy when he was a boy. He became a lecturer at St. Joseph's College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen's University, and began to have his poetry published. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world". He lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1976 until his death.

He was a part-time resident of the United States from 1981 to 2006, while he was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997 and their Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006.

Historical significance

He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume.