Name Michael Longley | Role Poet | |
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Education Trinity College, Dublin, Royal Belfast Academical Institution Books The Stairwell, Gorse fires, A Hundred Doors, The weather in Japan, The ghost orchid Similar People Louis MacNeice, Charis Vlavianos, W R Rodgers, Ovid, Elaine Feinstein | ||
Irish arts center fall 2011 poetry fest michael longley reading his poem harmonica
Michael Longley, CBE (born 27 July 1939) is a poet from Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Contents
- Irish arts center fall 2011 poetry fest michael longley reading his poem harmonica
- Poet michael longley reads from the stairwell
- Life and career
- Awards and honours
- List of works
- References
Poet michael longley reads from the stairwell
Life and career
Born in Belfast to English parents, Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus.
He was Professor of Poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010, a cross-border academic post set up in 1998, previously held by John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Durcan. He was succeeded in 2010 by Harry Clifton.
North American editions of Longley's work are published by Wake Forest University Press.
His wife, Edna Longley, is a critic on modern Irish and British poetry. They have three children.
An atheist, he describes himself as a "sentimental" disbeliever.
On 14 January 2014, Longley participated in the BBC Radio 3 series "The Essay – Letters to a Young Poet". Taking Rainer Maria Rilke's classic text, Letters to a Young Poet as inspiration, leading poets wrote a letter to a protege.
Awards and honours
Gorse Fires (1991) won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The Weather in Japan (2000) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize.
He holds honorary doctorates from Queen's University Belfast (1995) and Trinity College, Dublin (1999) and was the 2001 recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Longley was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours.
He won a 2011 London Awards for Art and Performance. His collection, A Hundred Doors, won the Poetry Now Award in September 2012.
His 2014 collection The Stairwell won the 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
In 2015, he received the Ulster Tattler Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2017 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. The Chair of the Judges, Don Paterson said "“For decades now his effortlessly lyric and fluent poetry has been wholly suffused with the qualities of humanity, humility and compassion, never shying away from the moral complexity that comes from seeing both sides of an argument.”