Longley, Michael, 1939-....

Michael Longley was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on July 27, 1939. He attended Malone Primary School and the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, before going on to Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. After graduating with honors in 1963, he held a variety of teaching positions in Blackrock, Dublin, London, and Belfast. It was while teaching in Belfast that Longley first attended Philip Hobsbaum's informal gatherings of writers known simply as "the group." There he and other young writers-including Seamus Heaney, Arthur Terry, Jack Packenham, Harry Chambers-read their poems and short stories and helped to foster the work of a new generation of Irish writers. Michael Longley has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Eric Gregory Award in 1965 and, more recently, the 1991 Whitbread Poetry Prize for Gorse Fires as well as the 2000 T.S. Eliot Prize for The Weather in Japan. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry in 2001. He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and of Aosdǹa. In addition to writing poetry, Longley has also edited collections of poems by Louis MacNeice and W.R. Rodgers, and from 1970 - 1991 he directed the literature programs of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 1994 Longley published a collection of autobiographical prose pieces under the title Tuppenny Stung. He is married to the critic Edna Longley and lives in Belfast.