Heaney, Seamus Justin (1939– )

Irish poet and critic. He has written powerful verse about the political situation in Northern Ireland and about Ireland's cultural heritage. The technical mastery and linguistic and thematic richness of Heaney's work have gained an international audience, and have exercised a powerful influence on contemporary poetry. He was professor of poetry at Oxford University 1989–94, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

His collections of poetry include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Field Work (1979), The Haw Lantern (1987), The Spirit Level (1996; Whitbread Book of the Year), Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (1998), and District and Circle (2006). Critical works include The Redress of Poetry (1995). His Beowulf: A New Translation (1999), a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon epic, also won the Whitbread Book of the Year award.

Born near Castledawsen, County Londonderry, Heaney was educated at Queen's University, Belfast. His Death of a Naturalist was the first collection from a group of Ulster poets with whom he was associated, including James Simmons, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley. 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), The Spirit Level (1996), and Electric Light (2001) 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.