Seamus Heaney- Brief Bio

Seamus Heaney was born in Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland (13, April, 1913). The eldest of nine children, Heaney won a scholarship in Columb’c College, Derry. He then attended Queen’s University, Belfast, became a school teacher, returned to his University as a lecturer in 1965. In 1966 he published his first collection of Poetry, Death of a Naturalist, during 1969 and 1972 he published his second and third works Door into the Dark and Wintering Out. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He began writing when he began teaching; an urge to compete with R. S. Thomas and Ted Hughes (his classroom poets). He became political when his environment was politicized. His model is not Joyce, its Auden, who teaches that poet’s tasks are making, judging and knowing. Heaney dies on 30th August 2013 (aged 74) Blackrock, Dublin in Ireland.