THE SEAMUS HEANEY LECTURES

 LÉACHTAÍ SEAMUS HEANEY

Seamus Heaney is one of the leading poets of his generation.  Born in County Derry in Northern Ireland and educated at Queen’s University, Belfast, he published his first book, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966.  Since then he has produced many volumes of poetry, criticism and translation.  His most recent collection, The Spirit Level, won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1996 and his translation of Beowulf was Whitbread’s 1999 winner.  He has been Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. In 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 2000, Professor Heaney agreed to lend his name to a series of public lectures to be hosted annually by St Patrick’s College, a college of Dublin City University.  The college is honoured and privileged to have so illustrious a patron for its lecture series, and is determined that the lectures will live up to their name in terms alike of the excellence, resourcefulness and alertness to humane values which have characterised the poet’s work from the beginning.

Seamus Heaney has had connections with St Patrick’s College since the early 1970s, when he was appointed Head of the English department at Carysfort College, Dublin, a sister college of St Patrick’s. (Carysfort was established by the Mercy Sisters in the late nineteenth century and remained a major centre for the education of primary teachers until its closure in the 1980s.)  In his work at Carysfort and in many of his lectures and publications in more recent years, Seamus Heaney has been a champion of the role of the Humanities in the broadest sense of that word in teacher education.