A native of Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The following excerpts are taken from interviews conducted with him in 1986 and shortly after he won the Nobel in 1996. Poetry summons you. That's been my own experience. The real difficulty about being a poet is not in the writing. It's surviving the silence, surviving lack of … [Read more...] about Seamus Heaney Poetic Champion
The Troubles
The First Word: A Little Boy’s Cry
On a plane to San Francisco a young couple sit across from me with two boys. The younger one is kicking up a ruckus. As I reach for my ear-plugs I hear the wife say something to her husband, a trendy fellow with glasses and an earring. "Big Ian" she calls him. Belfast, I think to myself. The accent is that of my sister-in-law Elaine. That this family is from Northern Ireland … [Read more...] about The First Word: A Little Boy’s Cry
The First Word: Living Up to The Nobel Prize
Ireland is no stranger to the Nobel Prize. Indeed the prize awarded each year in memory of Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite) has gone to citizens of the island a total of seven times. W.B. Yeats (1923), G.B. Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995) all won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But good writers aside, the Nobel Committee has also focused on … [Read more...] about The First Word: Living Up to The Nobel Prize
February / March 1999
Derry: The Town I Love So Well
By Mary Pat Kelly
May/June 1995
Mary Pat Kelly talks to Phil Coulter, one of Derry's most famous sons. Often during the years of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, when the"end of the day" brought political conversation, someone would sing PhilCoulter's "The Town I Loved So Well." And if the singer was from Derry they knew, too, "the gas yard wall" where soldiers had replaced school boys playing ball. … [Read more...] about Derry: The Town I Love So Well