Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He was widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and his work was influenced by Irish culture, history and language, as well as by his own personal experiences and the political situation in Northern Ireland. He was born in 1939 in a rural area near Castledawson, Northern Ireland, and grew up in a Catholic farming family. He attended St. Columb's College in Derry, where he won a scholarship to study at Queen's University Belfast. He graduated in 1961 with a degree in English language and literature, and began to publish his poems in magazines and journals. He also worked as a teacher and a lecturer in Belfast and Dublin. He married Marie Devlin, a fellow writer, in 1965, and they had three children. Heaney's first poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1966 and received critical acclaim. It was followed by several other volumes, such as Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). He also translated works from other languages, such as Beowulf (1999), The Cure at Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004). He also wrote essays, criticism, plays and prose. He received many awards and honours for his work, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Golden Wreath of Poetry. He was also a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Irish Academy of Letters and Aosdána. He was awarded honorary degrees from several universities, and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He died in 2013 in Dublin, after suffering from a stroke. He was buried in his native Bellaghy, near the grave of his parents. He is remembered as a poet of extraordinary skill, insight and humanity, who enriched the world with his words.