Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was the eldest of nine children on a farm called Mossbawn in County Londonderry. His father dealt in cattle; his mother’s family worked in a linen mill, and he later saw in the two lines an older rural Ireland and an industrial Ulster. A scholarship took him to St Columb’s College in Derry, and he read English at Queen’s University Belfast, where finding Ted Hughes’s poems showed him that his own rural experience could be the matter of poetry. He taught in Belfast through the 1960s.

Death of a Naturalist (1966) announced a poet of exact sensory memory: digging, churning, the frogspawn and flax-dam of childhood. As violence spread in Northern Ireland, his work turned to the Iron Age bodies preserved in Danish bogs, which in North (1975) became a way of thinking about sacrifice, tribe and complicity. He moved to the Republic in the 1970s and settled in Dublin. Later books, from Field Work to Seeing Things and The Spirit Level, grew more open and luminous without losing their grounding in physical things.

Heaney taught at Harvard for many years and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1989 to 1994. After the Nobel Prize he published a widely read verse translation of Beowulf, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year, and further collections, the last being Human Chain (2010). He died in Dublin in 2013 and is buried in Bellaghy.