Nobel Prize Winner

After the celebrated paramilitary ceasefires, the world reverberated to the sound of Seamus Heaney’s words: “The longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme,” taken from his 1990 play, The Cure at Troy. 

The man who once said that poetry grows inside him was suitably honored with the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. One of Ireland’s greatest poets, the Derry-born heaney uses the richly textured language of his land to sketch a portrait of the country’s psyche. 

Heaney served as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University for some years upon joining the faculty in 1982. In 1989 he was voted into the position of Professor of Poetry at England’s Oxford University. 

He first came to the U.S. in 1969, where his body of work grew as he found receptive American audiences. Heaney divides his time between the U.S., England and Ireland.