The Internet Poetry Archive, sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press and the North Carolina Arts Council, offers biographical and bibliographical information alongside some of Heaney's poems and his Nobel Lecture.

BIOGRAPHY
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), the eldest of nine children, was born on his family's farm near Belfast in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He attended local schools, earned a degree in English with first-class honors from Queen's University, Belfast, and took a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College in Belfast. He published his first writings while a student at St. Joseph's and began a career as a teacher.

His first volume of poetry, Death of a Naturalist (1966), won several prizes and launched Heaney's distinguished career as a poet. His many books include two volumes of essays, The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), as well as Selected Poems: 1966-1987 (1990) and The Spirit Level (1996), his most recent volume of poetry. He has taught at Oxford University; University of California, Berkeley; and Harvard.

An immensely popular poet, he enjoys the support of a host of "Heaneyboppers" who attend his readings. Several modern critics characterize him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." When asked "about his abiding interest in memorializing the people of his life, he replied, 'The elegiac Heaney? There's nothing else.'" In 1995, Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.