Musicians - Seamus Heaney

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	Musicians - Seamus Heaney

Séamus Justin Heaney (born April 13 1939) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer from County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Life

Séamus Heaney was born the eldest of nine children, at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, near Castledawson, in County Londonderry, thirty miles to the north-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He was brought up a Catholic and a nationalist (and as such calls the county of his birth "County Derry"). He regards himself as Irish, not British, as he made known publicly when some publication referred to him as "British", due to the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practising for the D-Day landings. His family moved to a bigger farm, at Bellaghy, in 1953.

He was educated initially at the local Anahorish primary school. He won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry, and it was while studying here as a young teenager that his family moved to Bellaghy. At St. Columb's he was taught the Irish language. In 1957 Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at the Queen's University of Belfast. He graduated in 1961 with a First Class Honours degree. During teacher training at St Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast, he went on a placement to St Thomas' Intermediate School in west Belfast. The headmaster of this school was the writer Michael MacLaverty from County Monaghan, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. In 1963 he became a lecturer at St Josephs. In spring of 1963, after contributing various articles to local magazines, he came to the attention of Philip Hobsbaum, then an English lecturer at Queen's University. Hobsbaum was to set up a Belfast Group of local young poets (to mirror the success he had with the London group) and this would bring Heaney into contact with other Belfast poets such as Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. In August 1965 he married Marie Devlin, a school teacher who was originally from Ardboe in County Tyrone. (Devlin is a writer herself and in 1994 published Over Nine Waves a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) His first book, Eleven Poems, was published in November 1965 for The Queen's University Festival. In 1966, Faber and Faber published his first volume called Death of a Naturalist. This collection met with much critical acclaim and went on to win a host of awards. Also in 1966 he was appointed as a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast and his first son, Michael, was born. A second son, Christopher, was born in 1968. In 1968, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called 'Room to Rhyme', which led to quite a lot of exposure for the poet's work. In 1969 Door Into The Dark was published.

After a spell as guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley he returned to Queen's University in 1971. In 1972, Heaney left his lectureship at Belfast and moved to the Republic of Ireland, working as a teacher at Carysfort College in Dublin. In 1972 Wintering Out was published, and over the next few years Heaney began to give readings throughout Ireland, Britain and the United States. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. He became an elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1975 Heaney published his fourth volume, North. He became Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin in 1976, and moved his family to Dublin the same year. His next volume, Field Work, was published in 1979.

Selected Poems and Preoccupations: Selected Prose was published in 1980. In 1981 he left Carysfort to become visiting professor at Harvard University, and in 1982 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Queens' University in Belfast. In 1983, along with Brian Friel and Stephen Rea he co-founded Field Day Publishing and in 1984 published Station Island. Also in 1984, Heaney was elected to the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, but later that year his mother, Margaret Kathleen, died. In 1987 his volume, The Haw Lantern, was published, but soon after publication, his father, Patrick, died. In 1988 a collection of critical essays entitled The Government of the Tongue was published. In 1989, he was elected to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, which he held for a five-year term to 1994 (not requiring residence in Oxford). Throughout this period he was dividing his time between Ireland and America. He also continued to give public readings, which were very popular. In 1986, Heaney received a Litt.D. from Bates College. So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed 'Heaneyboppers' suggesting an almost pop-music fanaticism on the part of his supporters.

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Musicians - Seamus Heaney

Life

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