1939- [Seamus Justin Heaney]; b. 13 April, at Mossbawn, a 50-acre farm in the towland of Tamniarn between Toomebridge (‘soft slab under the tongue’) and Castledawson in Co. Derry; the eldest of nine children eldest of nine with two sisters and six brothers [incl. Sheena, Hugh, Pat, Charlie and Dan]; in ‘ever-growing family’ of Patrick and Margaret [née McCann] Heaney; family moved to a farm inherited from an uncle at the other end of the parish, where Patrick Heaney had been raised, 1953, coinciding with the death of a Christopher, a brother of Seamus, in a road accident, 1953; ed. at Anahorish Primary School, a ‘mixed’ denominational school, 1945-51; afterwards proceeded on scholarship to St. Columb’s, Derry, as a boarder; studied with Seamus Deane, Eamonn McCann, et al.; taught by John Hume and Francis Brolly;

1957: enters QUB on scholarship, 1957; published poems in college magazine Gorgon but did not think of literary attainment; grad. with Ist Class Hons., and named outstanding student, 1961, with teaching in mind as a career; spent his prize money on books of Louis MacNeice, J. M. Synge and Oscar Wilde (‘a kind of looking for one’s own crowd, you know, after all that English literature’); commenced teacher-training at St. Joseph’s TTC, Belfast; taught at St. Thomas’s Intermediate School - a Catholic ‘maintained’ secondary school under Michael McLaverty [q.v.], then Head of English, 1962-63, who lent him Patrick Kavanagh’s Soul for Sale in late 1962; became aware of contemporary Southern poets on buying Robin Skelton’s edn. of Six Irish Poets (1962); contrib. “Tractors” [‘gargling sadly astride furrows’] and “Turkeys Observed” to Belfast Telegraph, 1962 [var. 1963]; first joined Philip Hobsbaum’s QUB poetry circle, 1963, meeting on Mondays in the Hobsbaums’ flat; published poems in The Irish Times; English lecturer at St Joseph’s College of Education (TTC), 1963-66;

1964: wrote “In our Own Dour Way”, an ‘extended essay’ on Ulster literary magazines (Trench, 1964); wrote “Digging” [‘the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words’], Summer 1964; sent poem-collection entitled “Advancements to Learning” for publication to Dolmen Press, and refused, 1964; Hobsbaum sent Group poems to Edward Lucie Smith, resulting in three [by Heaney] appearing in The Statesman (Dec. 1964) under editorship of Karl Miller (acc. to whom the typescripts arrived ‘meekly attended by a stamped and addressed envelope for their return’); Belfast Group given exposure by Mary Holland in Observer, during Belfast Festival, 1965; received letters of enquiry from Charles Monteith of Faber, January 1965; contrib. “Out of London” [column], to New Statesman, 1965, analysing ominous influence of Ian Paisley; pub. first collection, Death of A Naturalist (May 1966); m. Marie Devlin, Aug. 1965; member of Belfast Festival comittee (QUB); issued Eleven Poems (Fest. 1966); a first child, Michael [fam. Mick], b. 1966; wrote “Requiem for the Croppies” to celebrate 1966 (dealing with Wexford rather than Antrim in Rebellion of 1798); winner of Eric Gregory Award, 1967; winner of E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, 1967

1968: Somerset Maugham Award, 1968, and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1968; wrote “Bogland” after a visit to his friend the painter T. P. Flanagan in Autumn 1968; reporting Civil Rights for The Listener (“Old Derry Walls”, 28 Oct. 1968); QUB lecturer in English, 1968-72; contrib. “Bachelor Deceased” (June) and “The Thatcher” (Oct.) and other poems to The Honest Ulsterman during 1968; second son, Christopher, b. 1968; provided heavily ironic lyrics of song “Craig’s Dragoons” to be sung to the tune of “Dolly’s Brae”, for Seán Ó Riada’s Radio Éireann programme; issues Door into the Dark (1969), Poetry Book Society Choice; visits Spain in 1969; guest lecturer at UC Berkeley, 1970-71; resigned from ‘entirely agreeable’ teaching job in English Dept., QUB (Belfast) [‘to put the practice of poetry more deliberately at the centre of my life’]; moved to cottage in Glanmore, nr. Ashford, Co Wicklow, 1972, acquiring it from Prof. Ann Saddlemyer; issues Wintering Out (Nov. 1972); winner of Irish-American cultural Foundation Award, 1972; ed. Soundings (1972), the long-running Leaving Certificate poetry anthology;

1973: occas. presented Radio Éireann programme Imprints, 1973-77, introducing Robert Lowell in 1973; dg. Catherine Ann, b. 1973; Denis Devlin Award, 1973; Writer in Residence Award of American Irish Foundation; appointed Head of English Dept. at Carysfort College, Dublin, 1975-1981, death of Colum McCartney, a cousin, with Louis O’Neill, in random sectarian killing, 1975 [resp. commemorated in the consecutive poems “The Strand at Lough Beg”, and “Casualty”, both in Field Work, and later revisited in “Station Island”]; issues North (1975), winner of E. M. Forster Award, 1975; publ. 25 ‘Stations’ poems in Frank Ormsby’s Honest Ulsterman pamphlet ser., 1975; settling in Dublin in 1976; Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, presented by Lowell, 1976; succeeds Lowell as leader of poetry workshop, Harvard, 1976; delivers ‘The Sense of Place’ [lecture], Ulster Museum (Jan. 1977); delivers “The God in the Tree”, a radio-talk on early Irish nature-poetry incl. “Buile Suibhne”, and locating the origins of poetry in the pagan, feminine mysteries of the grove, RTÉ 1978; visits sites of Tollund Man in Silkeborg and the Grauballe man in Arrhus, Denmark; issues Field Work (1979);

1980: issues Selected Poems (1980), with a foreword by Ted Hughes; issues prose as Preoccupations (1980); reviews Brian Friel's Translations (‘the need we have to create enabling myths of ourselves and the danger we run if we too credulously trust to the sufficiency of these myths’, TLS Oct 1980)); joins newly-formed Field Day Company as Director with Seamus Deane, Brian Friel, and others, 1981; receives Harvard contract to teacher one term per year, 1980; appt. visiting professor at Harvard, 1981; features at the front place in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982), giving rise to a riposte in ‘An Open Letter’ (Derry 1983) - ‘Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green. / No glass of ours was ever raised to toast The Queen’; receives Bennett Award, 1982; D.Litt, QUB 1982; issues Sweeney Astray (1983), from Irish; beneficiary of Lannan Foundation award ($50,000); elected Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, 1984; wrote “Alphabets” as Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard, 1984; gave lecture, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland’ (1984; pamphlet 1855); issues Station Island (1984), including verses translated from St. John of the Cross (‘How well I know that fountain, filling, running,/although it is night …’); mother’s death, 1984 - to be commemorated in The Haw Lantern (1987); gave his lecture “The Placeless Heaven” as opening Address at Kavanagh’s Yearly, Carrickmacross (Nov. 1985); hon. degree of Open University; suffered the death of his father, 1986 (‘the final “unroofing” of the world [...]’; T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture at Canterbury, 1986, publ. as The Government of the Tongue (1986); inaugurates Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature at Emory Univ., Atlanta, Georgia, 1988;

1989: elected to Chair of Poetry at Oxford, 1989; appears on Record Island Discs, 1989; issues lectures Oxford as The Place of Writing (1989); wrote The Cure of Troy (1990), in which the eponynous hero of Sophocles’ Philoctetes decides to put aside his grievances and return to Troy to help the Greeks with his legendary bow (prefiguring the peace process in Northern Ireland); premiered by Field Day at Derry Guild Hall, 1990, and soon after in New York; member of committee that awarded the first David Cohen lifetime achievement prize to V. S. Naipaul, 1993; his Oxford lectures published as The Redress of Poetry (1995); read his translation of Beowulf at QUB Centenary, 1995 (ded. John Braidwood); awarded Nobel Prize for Literature, 5 Oct. 1995 (c.£240,000), being accompanied to Stockholm [Sweden] by family and friends including Seamus Deane; his Nobel Lecture published as Crediting Poetry (1996); settled at house on Strand Rd., Sandymount (Dublin 4); issues The Spirit Level (1996), winner of Whitbread Poetry Prize, 1997 (£21,000) murder of Sean Brown, chairman of GAA, Bellaghy, 1997 (‘crime against the Olympic spirit’); condemns Nigerian Govt. death sentence on Wole Soyinka in letter to New York Review of Books with seven other Nobel laureates, May 1997;

 

2009: winner of David Cohen Prize for Lifetime Achievement, March 2009; publ. of “Heaney at 70” (11 April 2009), an Irish Times Special Supplement, ed. Gerry Smyth, with tributes by Andrew Motion, Robert Pinsky, Helen Vendler, John F. Deane, Peter Fallon, Derek Mahon [poem], Henri Cole, Paul Muldoon, Peter Sirr, Joseph Woods, and Barrie Cooke [port.] and articles by Eileen Battersby, Dennis O’Driscoll, Belinda McKeon, and Niall McGonagle; publically defended Barack Obama against detractors, 2009; a virtual autobiography appeared as Stepping Stones (2009) in the form of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll; issue The Human Chain (2010), a collection based on his stroke experience, declared winner of the Foreward Poetry Prize, Oct. 2010; attended State Dinner for Elizabeth II at Áras an Uachtarain, May 2011 - satirists remarking that he did ‘toast the Queen’ on that occasion; Heaney’s papers are held at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia). DIL DIW FDA ORM HAM OCIL