Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright, and translator whose 50-year literary career produced one of the 20th-century English-language poetry bodies of work — including the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born Seamus Justin Heaney on April 13, 1939, in Castledawson, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, into a Catholic farming family. The family relocated to Bellaghy, Northern Ireland during his childhood. He attended St Columb's College in Derry and Queen's University Belfast (B.A. in English literature, 1961).

His literary career began with the 1966 first collection Death of a Naturalist — published when he was 26 — which established him as one of the young Northern Irish poetry figures of the late 1960s. The 1966 collection's agricultural-and-rural Northern Irish imagery, particularly the title-poem (about frog spawn collected by an young boy at a Northern Irish flax-dam), launched the Heaney aesthetic.

His poetry through the 1970s and 1980s produced multiple collections that shaped the late-20th-century English-language poetry — particularly Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1975, the collection that addressed the Troubles in Northern Ireland), Field Work (1979), and Station Island (1984).

His 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature — awarded for his body of work that the Nobel Committee described as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past" — established him as one of the 20th-century international poetry figures. His subsequent 1990s and 2000s body of work included The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and his 2000 translation of the Old English epic Beowulf — which became one of the 20th-century English-language translations of the Anglo-Saxon poem. He died on August 30, 2013, at age 74, in Dublin.

His name Seamus is the Irish form of James (from the Hebrew Yaaqov meaning "supplanter"). Seamus has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.