Biography and Background

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in Northern Ireland. He has been a resident of Dublin since 1976. His Irish upbringing as a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland had powerful impact on his work. His poems are grounded in actual detail and observation. As a poet, he has achieved significant prestige, as well as a reputation for work that is highly rated by the academic reader and popular with the public. His many awards include the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the Whitbread prize (twice), and the 1968 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He began to be noticed as a poet in the 1960s, with “Death of a Naturalist”, his initial collection of poems. Since then he has published hundreds more, including “Open Ground” (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also contributed works of criticism, drama, and translation.

For more information, visit

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/211

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/biography.php

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/seamus-heaney