Seamus Heaney

Nobel Prize in Literature 1995

Irish poet Seamus Justin Heany was born on April 13, 1939, near Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. The son of a small landowner and cattle rancher, he grew up in a Catholic environment.
He attended the local school until 1951, when he won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school. In 1953 his parents left the farm, a fact that aroused a certain nostalgia in him. He entered Queen's University Belfast in 1957 and, after obtaining his degree in 1961, went on to St. Joseph's College of Education, where he received pedagogical qualifications.
He worked for a year as a high school teacher, after which he reversed course, teaching for three years at St. Joseph's College of Education and, in 1966, at Queen's University. In 1965 he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled Eleven Poems, which was followed Death of a Naturalist (1966), which confirmed his reputation as a poet.
Between 1968 and 1969, Ulster became the scene of major religious persecutions, driven by the Protestant majority against those with Catholic convictions. British troops invaded the territory, leading Heaney to move in 1972 to County Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland, where he established himself as an independent writer. His experiences of the religious conflict are expressed in works such as... North (1975) and Field Work (1979). In 1975 he began teaching at Carysford College of Education, where he remained until 1981, when he was appointed visiting professor at Harvard University in the United States of America. Between 1989 and 1994 he was a full professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
Maintaining his visionary and allegorical character, Seamus Heaney also published the collection of essays. Concerns: Selected Prose (1968-1978), Station Island (1984), Seeing Things (1991) and Beowulf (1999), a poem inspired by the Anglo-Saxon medieval homonymous work, in which the author brings the saga back to the attention of the contemporary spirit, powerless before the dark forces of world politics. In 2001 he published Electric Light, a work in which the poet draws on his childhood memories.
Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.
In Infopédia [Online]. Porto: Porto Editora, 2003-2011.