Seamus Heaney biography Seamus Heaney was born into a Catholic family in 1939 in the county of Derry, the

eldest member of a family farm. He was educated at the local primary school at St. Columb's College in Derry. After that he attended Queen's University, Belfast. After graduating from Queen's University with a first-class honors degree in English language and literature and a teaching certificate, he held positions as a secondary school teacher and later returned to Queen's University as a lecturer. During this time he published his first major volume of poetry-Death of a Naturalist. In 1972 he moved from Belfast to a cottage outside Dublin and began writing full time. He returned to teaching in 1975 as head of the English department at Caryfort College in Dublin. During this period of time Wintering Out , North, and Field Work were published. Beginning in 1979, he adopted the practice of accepting academic appointments at various American universities and spending the rest of the year in Dublin. In 1986, he was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and in 1989, he became professor of poetry at Oxford University. To accommodate both positions, he split his time between a home in Dublin and one in Boston. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Throughout the 2000s, he was awarded several honors and doctorate degrees and in 2008 he was made artist of honor in stermarie, Denmark. In this time District and Circle gave him T. S. Eliot Prize. Two years later, he published his twelfth collection of poetry Human Chain that was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. Heaney died in the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin on 30 August 2013, aged 74, following a short illness.