Some Literary Legends

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is arguably Northern Ireland’s most famous son and the world’s greatest living poet.

• Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 to a farming family in Mossbawn, Co. Derry and he was educated at St. Columb’s College, Derry/ Londonderry and Queens University, Belfast.
• During his time at Queens, Heaney began his writing career under the pen name Incertus.
• He started his career as a teacher but soon returned to Queen's to lecture and it was at this time that he became associated with the Belfast Group of young writers.
• His first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966) immediately established his reputation as a poet.
• His second collection Door into the Dark was published in 1969 and after which he spent a year as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkley.
• In 1972, he moved to Wicklow where he worked as a freelance writer and broadcaster.
• Heaney’s collection North (1975) was probably the poet’s most controversial work and dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
• In 1981 he became visiting professor at Harvard University and between 1989 and 1995, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry.
• In 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his work’s “lyrical beauty and ethical depth.”
• Heaney has won several awards throughout his career and he is also noted for his critical and translation work.

Michael Longley

• Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 to English parents.
• He attended Royal Belfast Academical Institution and went on to study classics at Trinity College, Dublin.
• During his time at Trinity, he became friends with a number of other young writers including Derek McMahon.
• He initially worked as a teacher before joining the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1970.
• His first collection, No Continuing City was released in 1969.
• In the 1970s, Longley released three further collections with the final The Echo Gate being released in 1979.
• Longley did not release a further collection until Gorse Fires in 1991.
• Gorse Fires was critically acclaimed and received the Whitbread Prize for Poetry.
• The Weather in Japan (2000), won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Belfast Arts Award for Literature.
• From 2007 – 2010, he held the Ireland Chair of Poetry.

Glenn Patterson

• Born in Belfast in 1961, Glenn was educated at Methodist College and the University of East Anglia.
• He remained at the University of East Anglia to complete his MA in Creative Writing under the guardianship of Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury.
• In 1988, his debut novel Burning Your Own was published.
• He has worked as a Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and writer-in-residence at University College Cork and Queen's University Belfast where he currently teaches.
• His novels include Fat Lad (1992), The International (1999), That Which Was (2004). Glenn is also known for his articles and journalism work including essays, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and family memoir Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times (2008).
• In 2012, his first feature film, Good Vibrations, co-written with fellow Belfast writer Colin Carberry, debuted at the Belfast Film Festival. The film tells the story of Belfast music impresario Terri Hooley and the punk scene in Belfast in the late 70s.
• Glenn’s latest novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young was released in 2012 and selected as the text for Belfast’s first One City, One Book initiative.
  

C S Lewis

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Samuel Beckett

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