68 Facts About Seamus Heaney

1.

Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator.

2.

Seamus Heaney was born in the townland of Tamniaran between Castledawson and Toomebridge, Northern Ireland.

3.

Seamus Heaney's family moved to nearby Bellaghy when he was a boy.

4.

Seamus Heaney became a lecturer at St Joseph's College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen's University and began to publish poetry.

5.

Seamus Heaney lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1976 until his death.

6.

Seamus Heaney lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006.

7.

Seamus Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006.

8.

Seamus Heaney is buried at the Cemetery of St Mary's Church, Bellaghy, Northern Ireland.

9.

Seamus Heaney was born on 13 April 1939, at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toomebridge; he was the first of nine children.

10.

Seamus Heaney's mother was Margaret Kathleen McCann, whose relatives worked at a local linen mill.

11.

Seamus Heaney remarked on the inner tension between the rural Gaelic past exemplified by his father and the industrialized Ulster exemplified by his mother.

12.

Seamus Heaney attended Anahorish Primary School, and won a scholarship to St Columb's College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Derry, when he was twelve years old.

13.

Seamus Heaney played Gaelic football for Castledawson GAC, the club in the area of his birth, as a boy, and did not change to Bellaghy when his family moved there.

14.

Seamus Heaney straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf.

15.

Seamus Heaney studied English Language and Literature at Queen's University Belfast starting in 1957.

16.

Seamus Heaney graduated in 1961 with a First Class Honours degree.

17.

Seamus Heaney studied for a teacher certification at St Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast, and began teaching at St Thomas' Secondary Intermediate School in Ballymurphy, Belfast.

18.

In 1963 Seamus Heaney began lecturing at St Joseph's, and joined the Belfast Group, a poets' workshop organized by Philip Hobsbaum, then an English lecturer at Queen's University.

19.

Seamus Heaney met Marie Devlin, a native of Ardboe, County Tyrone, while at St Joseph's in 1962; they married in August 1965.

20.

In 1976 Seamus Heaney was appointed Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin and moved with his family to the suburb of Sandymount.

21.

Also in 1981 Seamus Heaney traveled to the United States as a visiting professor at Harvard, where he was affiliated with Adams House.

22.

Seamus Heaney was awarded two honorary doctorates, from Queen's University and from Fordham University in New York City.

23.

Seamus Heaney joined the company's expanded Board of Directors in 1981.

24.

In 1985 Seamus Heaney wrote the poem "From the Republic of Conscience" at the request of Amnesty International Ireland.

25.

Seamus Heaney wanted to "celebrate United Nations Day and the work of Amnesty".

26.

In 1988 Seamus Heaney donated his lecture notes to the Rare Book Library of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, after giving the notable [1] there.

27.

In 1989 Seamus Heaney was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, which he held for a five-year term to 1994.

28.

Seamus Heaney was named an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College Dublin, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

29.

In 1993 Seamus Heaney guest-edited The Mays Anthology, a collection of new writing from students at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge.

30.

Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".

31.

Seamus Heaney was on holiday in Greece with his wife when the news broke.

32.

Seamus Heaney would refer to the prize discreetly as "the N thing" in personal exchanges with others.

33.

Seamus Heaney was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1996 and was admitted in 1997.

34.

In 1998, Seamus Heaney was elected Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

35.

In 2000, Seamus Heaney was awarded an honorary doctorate and delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania.

36.

In 2002, Seamus Heaney was awarded an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University and delivered a public lecture on "The Guttural Muse".

37.

That same year, Heaney decided to lodge a substantial portion of his literary archive at Emory University as a memorial to the work of William M Chace, the university's recently retired president.

38.

Seamus Heaney donated these to help build their large existing archive of material from Irish writers including Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley and other members of the Belfast Group.

39.

Seamus Heaney has done this not just through his subversive attitude but his verbal energy.

40.

Seamus Heaney read the poem at a ceremony for the 25 leaders of the enlarged European Union, arranged by the Irish EU presidency.

41.

Seamus Heaney was in County Donegal at the time of the 75th birthday of Anne Friel, wife of playwright Brian Friel.

42.

Seamus Heaney read the works of Henning Mankell, Donna Leon and Robert Harris while in hospital.

43.

In 2009, Seamus Heaney was presented with an Honorary-Life Membership award from the University College Dublin Law Society, in recognition of his remarkable role as a literary figure.

44.

In 2009, Seamus Heaney was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

45.

Seamus Heaney recorded a spoken word album, over 12 hours long, of himself reading his poetry collections to commemorate his 70th birthday, which occurred on 13 April 2009.

46.

Seamus Heaney spoke at the West Belfast Festival in July 2010 in celebration of his mentor, the poet and novelist Michael McLaverty, who had helped Heaney to first publish his poetry.

47.

Human Chain was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, one of the major poetry prizes Seamus Heaney had never previously won, despite having been twice shortlisted.

48.

Seamus Heaney was named one of "Britain's top 300 intellectuals" by The Observer in 2011, though the newspaper later published a correction acknowledging that "several individuals who would not claim to be British" had been featured, of which Seamus Heaney was one.

49.

In June 2012, Seamus Heaney accepted the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award and gave a speech in honour of the award.

50.

The exhibit holds a display of the surface of Seamus Heaney's personal writing desk that he used in the 1980s as well as old photographs and personal correspondence with other writers.

51.

Seamus Heaney died in August 2013, during the exhibition's curatorial process.

52.

Seamus Heaney died in the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin on 30 August 2013, aged 74, following a short illness.

53.

Seamus Heaney's funeral was held in Donnybrook, Dublin, on the morning of 2 September 2013, and he was buried in the evening at his home village of Bellaghy, in the same graveyard as his parents, young brother, and other family members.

54.

Seamus Heaney's funeral was broadcast live the following day on RTE television and radio and was streamed internationally at RTE's website.

55.

At one time, Seamus Heaney's books made up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the UK.

56.

Seamus Heaney's work often deals with the local surroundings of Ireland, particularly in Northern Ireland, where he was born and lived until young adulthood.

57.

Again and again Seamus Heaney pulls back from political purposes; despite its emblems of savagery, Station Island lends no rhetorical comfort to Republicanism.

58.

Seamus Heaney is described by critic Terry Eagleton as "an enlightened cosmopolitan liberal", refusing to be drawn.

59.

Seamus Heaney published "Requiem for the Croppies", a poem that commemorates the Irish rebels of 1798, on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising.

60.

Seamus Heaney read the poem to both Catholic and Protestant audiences in Ireland.

61.

Seamus Heaney was concerned, as a poet and a translator, with the English language as it is spoken in Ireland but as spoken elsewhere and in other times; he explored Anglo-Saxon influences in his work and study.

62.

Seamus Heaney writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with received wisdom.

63.

Seamus Heaney took up this character and connection in poems published in Station Island.

64.

Seamus Heaney's prize-winning translation of Beowulf was considered groundbreaking in its use of modern language melded with the original Anglo-Saxon "music".

65.

Seamus Heaney's plays include The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes.

66.

Seamus Heaney continues: "The vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place".

67.

Seamus Heaney's work is used extensively in the school syllabus internationally, including the anthologies The Rattle Bag and The School Bag.

68.

The Seamus Heaney HomePlace, in Bellaghy, is a literary and arts centre which commemorates Heaney's legacy.