Seamus Heaney won the Nobel while on holiday and nobody could reach him
When the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Seamus Heaney, he was travelling in Greece with his wife. Reporters and even his own children failed to contact him for two days, though an Irish TV crew tracked him to Kalamata. He landed in Dublin and was whisked straight to champagne with President Mary Robinson.
Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 at Mossbawn, a farmhouse near Castledawson in County Londonderry, the eldest of nine. His father farmed and dealt in cattle, while his mother's relatives worked in a linen mill, and he later described feeling pulled between the rural Gaelic past of one side and the industrial Ulster of the other. At twelve he won a scholarship to St Columb's College in Derry. In February 1953 his four-year-old brother Christopher died in a road accident, a loss behind his poem Mid-Term Break.
At Queen's University Belfast, which he entered in 1957, a copy of Ted Hughes's Lupercal convinced him that contemporary poetry could be made from his own life. After graduating with first-class honours in 1961 he taught at a Belfast school whose headmaster, the writer Michael McLaverty, introduced him to Patrick Kavanagh's work and became almost a foster father. Faber and Faber published Death of a Naturalist in 1966 and stayed his publisher for life. In 1972 he left his Belfast lectureship for Wicklow to write full time, and from 1976 until his death he lived in Sandymount, Dublin. Although born and educated in Northern Ireland, he insisted he was Irish rather than British.
His career straddled the Atlantic. He taught at Harvard from 1981, later as Boylston Professor and then poet in residence until 2006, and held the Oxford Professor of Poetry chair from 1989 to 1994, when fans queuing for his readings were nicknamed Heaneyboppers. A 1985 poem written for Amnesty International Ireland gave its name to Amnesty's top honour, the Ambassador of Conscience Award. The Nobel committee praised the lyrical beauty and ethical depth of his work.
Two books won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, The Spirit Level and his 1999 Beowulf translation. Robert Lowell called him the most important Irish poet since Yeats. He died on 30 August 2013 and lies in Bellaghy, with a line from his poem The Gravel Walks, about walking on air, on his headstone.
Source: Seamus Heaney
