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was born in April 1939. He grew up on his father’s small farm in Northern Ireland but at 12 left home for a Catholic boarding school in the city of Derry, 40 miles away. From 1957 to 1972 he lived in Belfast and then in the Irish Republic where he has made his home. At school, he was taught Latin and Irish, and these languages, together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study at Queen's University, Belfast, have influenced his work. The Gaelic heritage has always has been part of his larger frame of reference and remains culturally and politically central.
Heaney’s first collection of poems, Eleven Works, was published in 1965 and was followed by several major publications including Selected Poems 1965-1975 and Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, both published in 1980. His early works examine the implications of having been born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, doomed, moreover, to suffer a quartercentury of violence, polarization and distrust. This gave him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. These concerns led to his association with Field Day, a theatre company which contributed greatly to the vigour of the cultural debate which flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland.
In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. He served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions and literary conferences. In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1996. |
