Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist (Faber) was published in 1965, and since then he has published nearly a hundred books, including District and Circle (Faber), which won the 2006 TS Eliot Prize, and Sweeney Astray (1984). Heaney held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994, and in 1995 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He won the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection for Human Chain, which was also nominated for T.S. Eliot Prize the same year.