On the eve of what would have been Seamus Heaney’s 83rd birthday, we mark the paperback publication of 100 Poems with a celebration of his life and work in the company of poets Ishion Hutchinson and Nick Laird, and his daughter, Catherine Heaney. In this online conversation chaired by the writer Jane Feaver, our panel will read their favourite poems from the selection, describe his influence and legacy, and read poems from their own work.
Seamus Heaney had the idea to form a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, and no other edition exists which has such a broad range, drawing from first to last of his prize-winning collections. But in 2018, the project was revisited, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems and will discover new favourites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching out far and wide, now and for years to come.
In this online conversation chaired by Jane Feaver, our panel will choose their favourite poems from the new collection and discuss Heaney’s influence and legacy.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His awards include the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2016 for his second collection, House of Lords and Commons.
Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. His poetry collections are To A Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants and Feel Free. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake and Modern Gods. His awards include the Betty Trask prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is on faculty at New York University, and is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.
Catherine Heaney grew up in Dublin, and has worked as journalist and editor in Dublin and London, at various magazines, and at the publishing company 4th Estate. From 2011 to 2014, she was head of Faber and Faber’s creative writing school Faber Academy. In 2016, Catherine edited a volume of essays, Trinity Tales: TCD in the Nineteen Nineties, published by Lilliput Press. She is a director of the estate of her father Seamus Heaney, and works with publishers and cultural institutions to preserve and promote her father’s work and legacy. Catherine is based in London.
Jane Feaver has been writing and publishing fiction since 2006. For a dozen years in the 1990s she worked in the poetry department at Faber. She now lives in Edinburgh, where she is a Trustee of the StAnza International Poetry Festival. She is a freelance writer and editor. Her latest novel Crazy is published by Corsair.
Our online events take place via Zoom and last up to one hour.
- You will be emailed the link for the event the day before the event. If you haven’t received it by the morning of the event, please forward your confirmation email to members@faber.co.uk.
- We are unable to accept live questions during the event. However, you can email your questions in in advance to members@faber.co.uk, although we are unable to guarantee which questions, if any, will be covered due to time constraints.
- When you book for this event, you will receive an email confirmation along with a promotional code to use on our website for 20% off 100 Poems.
- Ticket holders will have access to a link of a recording of the event and will have the opportunity to re-watch if for a period of 10 days afterwards.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013.
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A singular, accessible selection of the poems of Seamus Heaney, for new and younger readers and for schools – now in paperback.