Michael Longley, (born 27 July 1939, Belfast, Northern Ireland), is an Irish poet.

Life and career

One of twin boys, Michael Longley was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 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 the Ireland Professor of Poetry 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. Over 50 years, he has spent much time in Carrigskeewaun, County Mayo, which has inspired much of his poetry. His wife, Edna, is a critic on modern Irish and British poetry. They have three children. Their daughter is the artist Sarah Longley. An atheist, Longley describes himself as a "sentimental" disbeliever. On 14 January 2014, he 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. Longley has provided readings of his poetry for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive (UCD). In 1994, Longley wrote his most famous poem, 'Ceasefire'. The poem was written in hope of a ceasefire between the IRA and British Unionist Forces, and was released only one day before one came about. The poem adapts a famous scene from the Iliad, where King Priam begs for the body of his son back from the warrior Achilles. His twin brother, Peter, died in 2013/14. Longley dedicated the second half of The Stairwell (2014), his tenth collection, to him.

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. It also brought him the inaugural Yakamochi Medal in 2018. 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. Longley 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 Tatler Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017. 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." In 2015 Longley was elected a Freeman of the City of Belfast. In 2018, he was made an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

List of works