Seamus Heaney Biography of a Poet

To commemorate the 2005 Award Ceremony, photographer Paula Allen has donated an image from her haunting photographic exhibit Flowers in the Desert which has been produced in a limited edition poster.

A short biography of the Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney

Back to The Republic of Conscience, the poem that inspired the award

The 1995 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney has won numerous other awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (1973), the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize (1975), the American Irish Foundation Literary Award (1973) and the W H Smith Annual Award (1976). In 1987 he was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Award for the Haw Lantern.

A native of Country Derry, in Northern Ireland, Heaney is currently the Ralph Walso Emerson Poet-in-Residence at Harvard University where he teaches for six weeks every two years. He was born in 1939 and has been actively writing and publishing since 1962. His previous academic positions have included posts at Queen's University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University.

He is a graduate of Queen's University Belfast and served on the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland from 1974 to 1979. He is also a member of the Aosdána association of creative artists in Ireland.