Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school. When he was twelve years old, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb's College. There Heaney was taught Latin and Irish, and he also studies Anglo-Saxon while a student of Queen's University, Belfast.

In 1961 Heaney graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, where he became a lecturer in 1961.

Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who became the mother of his three children. His poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s.

In 1972 Heaney gave up his work at Queen's. Partly to escape the violence of Belfast, he moved from to County Wicklow, where he was a freelance writer for three years. After spending frequent periods as a guest professor at American universities, he was appointed visiting professor at Harvard.

Heaney was Professorship for Poetry at Oxford from 1989 until 1994. In 1995 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

He now divides his time between Harvard and Dublin.

(Seamus Heaney died in the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin on 30 August 2013, aged 74. After a fall outside a restaurant in Dublin, he entered hospital for a medical procedure, but died the following morning before it took place.)