First Steps into Poetry

Today is Poetry Day in Ireland and to celebrate, we have delved into the archives to find this recording of Seamus Heaney talking about his first tentative steps into a writing life. In this 1996 interview with John Quinn for RTE's My Education radio programme, he discusses early influences, the discovery of Irish writers like Kavanagh and Synge, sharing work with his contemporaries in The Group, and publication of his first poems. Take five minutes and have a listen!

 

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Beacons at Bealtaine, 20 years on

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

Announcing the PEN Heaney Prize
Announcing the PEN Heaney Prize

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.

Announcing the Heaney-Miłosz Residency in Kraków
Announcing the Heaney-Miłosz Residency in Kraków

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

Heaney and Amnesty: From the Republic of Conscience
Heaney and Amnesty: From the Republic of Conscience

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.

Hope and History: Celebrating 30 Years of The Cure at Troy with the NLI
Hope and History: Celebrating 30 Years of The Cure at Troy with the NLI

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.

Online event: Roy Foster 'On Seamus Heaney'
Online event: Roy Foster 'On Seamus Heaney'

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.

Broadsides, a new book and Biden
Broadsides, a new book and Biden

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.

Seamus Heaney Broadsides
Seamus Heaney Broadsides

Over the past year, we’ve been working with the Dublin-based fine art print studio, Stoney Road Press, on a very special project.

'If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere'
'If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere'

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's Director's diary
Adam Low's Director's diary

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.