Seamus Justin Heaney,
MRIA (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an
Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995
Nobel Prize in Literature. In the early 1960s, he became a lecturer in
Belfast after attending university there and began to publish poetry. He lived in
Sandymount,
Dublin, from 1976 until his death. Heaney was recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry during his lifetime. Heaney was a professor at
Harvard from 1981 to 1997 and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the
Professor of Poetry at
Oxford and, in 1996, was made a
Commandeur de l'
Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Other awards that he received include the
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the
E. M. Forster Award (1975), the
PEN Translation Prize (1985), the
Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), the
T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two
Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). In 2011, he was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and in 2012, a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust. His literary papers are held by the
National Library of Ireland.