Seamus Heaney
(1939-2013), Poet and Nobel Prize winnerSeamus Justin Heaney
Sitter in 24 portraits
Seamus Heaney was born at Mossbawn, and lived in Dublin from 1976 until his death. His publications include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), The Haw Lantern (1987) and The Spirit Level (1996). His modern translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, won him a second Whitbread Book of the Year Prize in 2000. Heaney held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1989 until 1994 and Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard from 1985 to 1998. He was selected for numerous awards and honours including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award in 2012.
Watch a film clip on the sitter from the BBC Archive in the Media section below
by Peter Edwards
oil on canvas, 1987-1988
NPG 6023
by Ross Wilson
charcoal and pencil, surface worked, 1994
NPG 6261
Marie Heaney (née Devlin); Seamus Heaney; Michael Heaney; Christopher Heaney
by Rollie McKenna
bromide print, 1969
NPG x137184
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