We are delighted to announce a major new exhibition from the National Library of Ireland devoted to the life and work of Seamus Heaney, opening in Dublin in summer 2018. 'Listen Now Again' will be the inaugural exhibition at a major new cultural space located in the historic surroundings of Bank of Ireland on College Green.
Drawing on Seamus Heaney's archive of manuscripts, notebooks and literary papers – donated by the poet and his family to the NLI in 2011 – this landmark exhibition will give everyone from schoolchildren to scholars to newcomers to Heaney's work the chance to observe the poet's creative process first hand. The title is drawn from the closing line of Seamus Heaney's poem 'The Rainstick'.
The exhibition is curated by Professor Geraldine Higgins, who knew Heaney personally and has previously put together another exhibition of his work at Emory University in Atlanta. Professor Higgins has written a piece describing the process of working with the poet's manuscripts, combined with her memories of the man - read on our News and Articles page.
For more information on 'Listen Now Again', visit www.nli.ie.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of EU’s Day of Welcomes, a short film of ‘Beacons at Bealtaine’, the poem Seamus Heaney wrote to celebrate the historic occasion
On the eve of what would have been Seamus’s 85th birthday, we are delighted to share news of a new venture we have been working on with our friends at English PEN and Irish PEN - the PEN Heaney Prize.
We are delighted to announce the Heaney-Miłosz Residency, a brand new partnership with the Irish Embassy in Poland and Kraków Festival Office, giving a writer the opportunity to spend time in Kraków, in the Czesław Miłosz apartment
With this unprepossessing and typically modest covering letter from 1985, Seamus Heaney submitted a first draft of his renowned poem ‘From the Republic of Conscience’ to Mary Fogarty, then head of the Irish branch of Amnesty International.
The National Library of Ireland presents an online event - available for seven days from Tuesday 8 December 2020 - celebrating 30 years since the first performance of Seamus Heaney’s play, The Cure at Troy, produced by the Field Day Theatre Company in 1990.
This autumn saw the publication of historian and biographer Roy Foster’s new study, On Seamus Heaney, part of Princeton University Press’s Writers on Writers series.
It has been a strange, uneasy summer - to put it mildly - but we’ve been lucky to have some good news to share at the end of it.
Over the past year, we’ve been working with the Dublin-based fine art print studio, Stoney Road Press, on a very special project.
Since the beginning of the current coronavirus crisis, people have been turning to poetry to express their bewilderment, to seek comfort, to put words to a situation that at times feels beyond comprehension.
Adam Low is the director of the recent BBC2 Arena documentary, Seamus Heaney and the Music of What Happens. Here he describes meeting the Heaney family for the first time and how he went about making this very personal and intimate documentary.