| 1 | Name: | Dr. Seamus Heaney | |
| Institution: | Harvard University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2000 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1939 | ||
| Death Date: | August 30, 2013 | ||
Born and educated in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as Ireland's greatest poet since William Butler Yeats. His carefully crafted work received international praise for its powerful imagery, meaningful content, musical phrasing and compelling rhythms. In 1996, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Educated at St. Columb's College and Queen's University in Belfast, he worked as a teacher at college and university level in Belfast in the 1960s, moving with his family to the Irish Republic in 1972. After some years as an independent writer, he resumed work as a college lecturer. In 1982 he began his long association with Harvard University, coming and going for a term each year until 1996. At that time, he resigned the Boylston Professorship to begin a more flexible affiliation as Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence, a position he resigned in 2007. Between 1989 and 1994 he also served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Since the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1966, Mr. Heaney produced many works of poetry, criticism and translation. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 appeared in 1998 and Finders Keepers, his selected prose, in 2002. Other recent publications include Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (1998) and Electric Light (2001). His version of Sophocles' Antigone, entitled The Burial at Thebes, was produced as part of the Abbey Theatre's centenary celebrations. In 2007 he won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for his latest collection, District and Circle and in 2009 he won the Royal Irish Academy's Cunningham Medal. Seamus Heaney was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2000. He died on August 30, 2013, at the age of 74, in Dublin. | |||