Heaney, Seamus, 1939-2013

Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, in County Derry. He was the eldest of nine children born to Margaret (McCann) and Patrick Heaney. He grew up on the family farm, Mossbawn, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast. He attended St Columb's College from 1951 to 1957, and then Queen's University, Belfast, where he recieved his degree in English and Literature in 1961. He received his teacher's certificate St. Joseph's College in Belfas and taught at St Thomas' Secondary Intermediate School for one year before returning to St. Joseph's, where he was a lecturer for three years. In 1966 he became a lecturer at Queen's University.

In 1965, in connection with the Belfast Festival, he published his first collection of poems, Eleven Poems. That same year he married Marie Devlin. In 1966 their first son Michael was born and Heaney published Death of a Naturalist, for which he received the Eric Gregory Award (1966), the Cholmondeley Award (1967), the Somerset Maugham Award (1968), and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize (1968). Heaney's second son Christopher was born in 1968. The following year his second volume, Door into the Dark, was published. His first two volumes were often noted for their sensuous detail of Heaney's homeland. In 1972 he moved his family to County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland, began writing full time. and published his third volume, Wintering Out. In 1973 his daughter, Catherine Ann, was born. In 1975 Heaney began teaching at Carysfort College in Dublin, where the family moved the following year. In 1981 he left Carysfort and became a visiting professor at Harvard. In 1984 he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. His mother, who died in that same year, is memorialized in his 1987 work, The Haw Lantern . Heaney's father died shortly thereafter and he is remembered in many poems from the 1991 collection, Seeing Things. Between the years 1989 and 1994 Heaney held the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. In 1995 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.

In the late 1990s, Heaney was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Aosdána, and Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. Heaney's next two poetry collections won the Whitbread Book of the Year award (1996 and 1999). In 2003, Queen's University, Belfast opened their Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Heaney's 2006 book District and Circle won the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Heaney's twelfth collection Human Chain was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection in 2010. In 2009 Heaney himself was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Heaney was in the process of compiling Selected Poems 1988–2013 when he died in Dublin on 30 August 2013, aged 74, following a short illness.