Heaney, Seamus Justin (1939-2013), poet, translator, literary critic and Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge

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Heaney, Seamus Justin (1939-2013), poet, translator, literary critic and Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge

• Seamus Justin Heaney Hon DLitt (Oxon), FBA, MRIA

13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013

Seamus Heaney was born at Mossbawn farm, near Castledawson, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland on 13 April 1939. After an education, teaching and lecturing in English in Belfast from the late 1950s through the 1960s, with ‘The Troubles’ he and his family moved to Eire in 1972. He lived in Dublin from 1976 until his death (30 August 2013). His publications include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), The Haw Lantern (1987) and The Spirit Level (1996). His modern translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, won him a second Whitbread Book of the Year Prize in 2000. Heaney held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1989 until 1994 and Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard from 1985 to 1998. He was selected for numerous awards and honours including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 - 'for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past' - and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award in 2012.

College Magazine
Obituary by E. Duffy in College Magazine, No. 58, 2013-14 (pp. 11-16)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography