Seamus Heaney

Irish poet and critic. Born near Castledawsen County Londonderry, in 1939 He has written verse about the political situation in Northern Ireland and his reflections on Ireland's cultural heritage. Collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Field Work (1979), The Haw Lantern (1987), The Spirit Level (1996; Whitbread Book of the Year), and Opened Ground: Poems 1966 1996 (1998). Critical works include The Redress of Poetry (1995). His Beowulf: A New Translation (1999), a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon epic, won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. He was professor of poetry at Oxford 1989 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Heaney was educated at Queen's University, Belfast. His Death of a Naturalist was the first collection. Heaney's early work, in this collection and in Door into the Dark (1969), was marked by a densely descriptive evocation of rural life. The poems of Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) explore history and prehistory as a vehicle for oblique comment on the contemporary 'Troubles' of Northern Ireland. Later collections, including Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), and The Spirit Level (1996), mix increasingly self-conscious political language with more private love-poetry and elegy, and display a continuing concern with the natural world, and with the wider responsibilities of poetry.

The technical mastery and linguistic and thematic richness of Heaney's work have gained an international audience, and exercised a powerful influence on contemporary poetry.