People

Seamus Heaney

Poet/ Composer

Seamus Heaney was born and educated in Northern Ireland. In the 1960s he worked first as a teacher and eventually at Queen’s University, Belfast, before moving with his family in 1972 to the Irish Republic. After some years as a freelance, he resumed work as a college lecturer. Then, in1982, he began his long association with Harvard University, coming and going for a term each year until 1997, when he resigned the Boylston Professorship and began a much looser affiliation as Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence. Between 1989 and 1994, Heaney also served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. 

Since the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1966, Heaney has produced books of poetry, criticism and translation. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 appeared in 1998 and Finders Keepers, his selected prose, in 2002. Other recent publications include Beowulf, A New Verse Translation (1998), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). His version of Sophocles’ Antigone, entitled The Burial at Thebes was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre in 2004 as part of their centenary celebrations and Stepping Stones, a book length collection of interviews with him by the poet Dennis O’Driscoll, appeared in 2008.

It was during his period at Queen’s University that Seamus Heaney met Raymond Warren who was then Professor of Music; both of them were involved in the annual university arts festival and contributors to the creative ferment that occurred in Belfast in the mid to late 1960s. So when the poet’s A Lough Neagh Sequence appeared in 1967, their collaboration was prompt and rewarding for each of them.

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UHR023: The Next Ocean - Raymond Warren, Seamus Heaney