Discover the Best Books Written by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney, MRIA, was an Irish poet, playwright, translator, and lecturer and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born near Castledawson, Northern Ireland, the family moved to nearby Bellaghy when he was a boy. Heaney became a lecturer in Belfast in the early 1960s after attending university there and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1976 until his death. Heaney was recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry during his lifetime. 

Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997 and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford and, in 1996, was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Other awards that he received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), the T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). 

In 2011, he was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize, and in 2012, a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust. The National Library of Ireland holds his literary papers.

Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats," and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he was "the greatest poet of our age." Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear, Heaney has the gift of the storyteller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world."