The Latest Breaking News from Seamus Heaney

Belfast poet of exceptional poise and eloquence – but with a sardonic streak to temper his technical accomplishment

BOOKS: The Independent’s writers look back on the literary year and select the very best books to gift your loved ones this festive season

Other lives: Poet and educator whose books transformed the teaching of poetry-writing in schools

Delve into the hypnotic world of lyrical literature

The Labour MP and party historian on why he worries for Keir Starmer, the decline of social democracy, and his love of Seamus Heaney

The poet on discovering Seamus Heaney, revisiting Alice Walker and the joy of Allan Ahlberg

The academic and author on the lessons we can learn from those who work the land, acquiring a second career in his 70s – and how he ‘dialogues’ with the spirit of Seamus Heaney

The English war poet Wilfred Owen once wrote, “Celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.” Killed in France at the age of 25, unpublished and unknown, “celebrity” for Owen was a posthumous phenomenon. By contrast, celebrity status for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney – “Famous Seamus” – came early in…

Poet and editor of the magazine Aquarius who was a charismatic figure in literary London from the late 1960s