Seamus Heaney (born April 13 1939) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer from County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Life

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Seamus Justin Heaney was born the eldest of nine children, at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, near Castledawson, in County Londonderry, thirty miles to the north-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He was brought up a Roman Catholic and a nationalist (and as such calls the county of his birth "County Derry"). He regards himself as Irish, not British, as he made known publicly when a publication referred to him as "British", due to the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practising for the D-Day landings. His family moved to a bigger farm in nearby Bellaghy in 1953.

He was educated initially at the local Anahorish primary school. He won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry, and it was while studying here as a young teenager that his family moved to Bellaghy. At St. Columb's he was taught the Irish language.

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