Over the past year, we’ve been working with the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University on the Annual Seamus Heaney Lecture, a new collaboration between the institute and the Estate of Seamus Heaney.

Today marks the US publication by Farrar Straus and Giroux of 100 Poems, a selection of one hundred of Seamus Heaney’s best-loved poems – spanning his career, from first collection to last – as chosen by the poet’s family.

In a new history of the firm founded by his grandfather, Toby Faber delves into the Faber archives to tell the inside story of this great publishing house. Here, the legendary poetry editor Charles Monteith writes to a young Seamus Heaney, while a few years later, Heaney himself directs Monteith towards an aspiring poet by the name of Muldoon…

Seamus Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 – tomorrow would have been his 80th birthday.