Longley, Michael George

(1939- )

   Irish poet, born in Belfast of English parents, he was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. After reading classics at Trinity College, Dublin, he was a schoolteacher in Belfast, Dublin and London. He was combined arts director for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1991, when he became a full-time writer. He was writer fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, and has written scripts for BBC Radio. Queen's University Belfast (1985) and Trinity College Dublin (1999) made him honorary doctor of laws. From 1965 to 2004 his poetry has won eight major literary awards. His collection, The Weather in Japan (2000), won the Hawthornden Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Belfast Arts Award for Literature. He lives in Belfast with his wife, the critic Edna Longley. Some of his publications: Poems 1963-1983, 1991. Birds and Flowers: Poems, 1994. The Ghost Orchid, 1995. Ship of the Wind, 1997. Broken Dishes, 1998. Selected Poems, 1998. Snow Water, 2004. Some of his poems: "Ceasefire," "Desert Warfare," "Odyssey," "The Beech Tree," "The Civil Servant," "The Hebrides," "Wounds," "Wreathes."

   Sources: Bitter Harvest: An Anthology of Contemporary Irish Verse. John Montague, ed. Scribner's, 1989. Irish Poetry: An Interpretive Antholog y from Before Swift to Yeats and After. W.J. McCormack, ed. New York University Press, 2000. Biography of Michael Longley (http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth199). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. Paul Muldoon, ed. Faber and Faber, 1986. The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation. Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule, eds. 1995. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon, eds. Penguin Books, 1990. Who's Who. London: A & C Black, 2005.