Heaney, Seamus Justin

Irish poet and critic. He has written powerful verse about the political situation in Northern Ireland and about Ireland's cultural heritage. The technical mastery and linguistic and thematic richness of Heaney's work have gained an international audience, and have exercised a powerful influence on contemporary poetry. He was professor of poetry at Oxford University 1989–94, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

His collections of poetry include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Field Work (1979), The Haw Lantern (1987), The Spirit Level (1996; Whitbread Book of the Year), Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (1998), and District and Circle (2006). Critical works include The Redress of Poetry (1995). His Beowulf: A New Translation (1999), a modern version of the Anglo-Saxon epic, also won the Whitbread Book of the Year award.