storm on the island

• Seamus Heaney is a playwright, translator and a poet.

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• Seamus Heaney was born in Castledawson, Northern Ireland in 1939 and is the eldest of 9 children.

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• His father was a farmer in rural County Derry and much of Heaney’s poetry is about the countryside and farm life that he has become accustomed to due to his childhood. His father farmed 50 acres of land.

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

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• Heaney taught poetry in Harvard (1985-2006) and Oxford University (1989-1994) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

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• He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism and edited several widely used anthologies.

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• Richard Murphy described Heaney as "the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present."

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• The impact of his surroundings and the details of his upbringing on his work are immense. As a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland, Heaney once described himself in the New York Times Book Review as someone who "emerged from a hidden, a buried life and entered the realm of education."

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• He studied English at Queen’s University, Belfast.

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• Heaney’s work has always been most concerned with the past, even his earliest poems of the 1960s.

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• In 2009, Seamus Heaney turned 70. A true event in the poetry world, Ireland marked the occasion with a 12-hour broadcast of archived Heaney recordings.

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• At age 74, Seamus Heaney died from complications from a stroke at 2013 in Blackrock, Dublin.

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• He was married to Mare Devlin (1965 – 2013) and had 3 children Michael, Christopher and Catherine Ann.