Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He grew up in the country, on a farm, in touch with a traditional rural way of life, which he wrote about in his first book Death of a Naturalist (1966). He attended the local school and in 1951 went as a boarder to St Columb's College, about 40 miles away in Derry (the poem 'Singing School' in North refers to this period of his life).

In 1956 he went on a scholarship to Queen's University, Belfast and graduated with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1961. After a year as a post-graduate at a college of education, and a year teaching in a secondary modern school in Ballymurphy, he was appointed to the staff of St Joseph's College of Education.

In 1966 Seamus Heaney took up a lecturing post in the English Department of Queen's University, and remained there until 1972, spending the academic year 1970-71 as a visiting Professor at the University of California in Berkeley.In 1972 Seamus Heaney stopped teaching in order to devote more time to his writing, and moved with his family to Glanmore in County Wicklow, and later to Dublin. For three years he made his living as a freelance writer, presenting a radio programme for RTE and doing occasional work for the BBC and for various journals. During this period he produced the poems collected in North (1975).

In September 1975 he resumed his teaching, this time at Carysfort College in Dublin. Seamus Heaney began to write in 1962, publishing first in Irish magazines. During the early and mid-sixties, he was connected with a group of writers in Belfast that included Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and James Simmons. Philip Hobsbaum ran a poetry group during these years and the poets met regularly at his house until he moved to Glasgow in 1966.

After this, the meetings continued under Heaney's chairmanship until 1970, and in this later period were attended by younger poets such as Paul Muldoon, Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley. In 1968, with Michael Longley and the singer David Hammond, Seamus Heaney took part in a two-week reading tour of Northern Ireland called 'Room to Rhyme', the first in a series of such literary enterprises sponsored by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974 and served until 1979. He is a member of Aosdana..