Irish pages seamus heaney biography

(1939-2013)

Who Was Seamus Heaney?

Seamus Heaney published his first poetry book in 1966, Death of a Naturalist, creating vivid portraits of rural life.

Later work looked at his homeland's civil war, and he won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature for his globally acclaimed oeuvre, with its focus on love, nature and memory. A professor and speaker, Heaney died on August 30, 2013.

Background and Early Career

Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on a farm in the Castledàwson, County Londonderry region of Northern Ireland, the first of nine children in a Catholic family.

He received a scholarship to attend the boarding school St. Columb's College in Derry and went on to Queens University in Belfast, studying English and graduating in 1961.

Heaney worked as a schoolteacher for a time before becoming a college lecturer and eventually working as a freelance scribe by the early 1970s.

In 1965, he married Marie Devlin, a fellow writer who would figure pro