Seamus Heaney (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; born 13 April 1939) is an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, he now resides in Dublin.[2][3]
As well as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney has received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999).[4][5] He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996. Heaney's literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland. On 6 June 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.
Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age".

Early life
Heaney was born on 13 April 1939, at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toomebridge in Northern Ireland; he was the first of nine children.

In 1953, his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away, which is now the family home.

His father, Patrick Heaney, was the eighth child of ten born to James and Sarah Heaney. Patrick was a farmer, but his real commitment was to cattle-dealing, to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents

Heaney's mother, Margaret Kathleen McCann, came from the McCann family, whose uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill, and whose aunt had worked as a maid for the mill owner's family.

The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background.

Heaney initially attended Anahorish Primary School, and when he was twelve years-old, he won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Roman Catholic boarding school situated in Derry.

Heaney's brother, Christopher, was killed in a road accident at the age of four, while Heaney was studying at St. Columb's.

The poems "Mid-Term Break" and "The Blackbird of Glanmore" focus on his brother's death.

For more details on on this part of Heaney's career, see his collections, Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark.
In 1957, Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at Queen's University Belfast. During his time in Belfast, he found a copy of Ted Hughes's Lupercal, which spurred him to write poetry. "Suddenly, the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life," he has said.

He graduated in 1961 with a First Class Honours degree. During teacher training at St Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast (now merged with St Mary's, University College), Heaney went on a placement to St Thomas' secondary Intermediate School in west Belfast.

The headmaster of this school was the writer Michael McLaverty from County Monaghan, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh.With McLaverty's mentorship, Heaney first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962.

Hillal describes how McLaverty was like a foster father to the younger Belfast poet. In the introduction to McLaverty's Collected works, Heaney summarised the poet's contribution and influence: "His voice was modestly pitched, he never sought the limelight, yet for all that, his place in our literature is secure."[12] Heaney's poem Fosterage, in the sequence Singing School from North (1975) is dedicated to him.
In 1963, Heaney became a lecturer at St Joseph's and in the spring of 1963, after contributing various articles to local magazines, he came to the attention of Philip Hobsbaum, then an English lecturer at Queen's University. Hobsbaum was to set up a Belfast Group of local young poets (to mirror the success he had with the London group) and this would bring Heaney into contact with other Belfast poets such as Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. In August 1965 he married Marie Devlin, a school teacher and native of Ardboe, County Tyrone. (Devlin is a writer herself and, in 1994, published Over Nine Waves, a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) Heaney's first book, Eleven Poems, was published in November 1965 for the Queen's University Festival. In 1966, Faber and Faber published his first major volume, called Death of a Naturalist. This collection met with much critical acclaim and went on to win several awards, the Gregory Award for Young Writers and the Geoffrey Faber Prize.[10] Also in 1966, he was appointed as a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast and his first son, Michael, was born. A second son, Christopher, was born in 1968. That same year, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called Room to Rhyme, which led to much exposure for the poet's work. In 1969, his second major volume, Door into the Dark, was published.

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Biography of Seamus Heaney
His family didn’t have the funds to send him to college, but a scholarship allowed him to attend college and live on campus. He learned Latin and Irish while in school, both of which he would later use in his career. While attending college, Heaney's brother died. He would later write several poems about his brother's death.
Heaney moved to the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1957, and majored in English Literature. After graduating in 1961, he went to the St. Joseph’s Teacher Training College where he learned the skills to become a teacher. While completing a placement program at St. Thomas’ Secondary Intermediate School he met Michael MacLaverty. MacLaverty broadened his horizons by showing him poetry of other poets that he’d never read before.

من عائلة فقيرة. والده كان يعمل في تربية الماشية. لكن واضح ان اهم حدث اثر فيه هو موت اخاه بحادث بينما كان عمر ذلك الاخ 4 سنوات وهذا يعني بأن هذا الموت حدث في طفولة الشاعر. ايضا هناك المدرسة الداخلية ثم الجامعة التي انتقل اليها ليسكن بعيدا عن العائلة.

مأزوم.