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A TRIBUTE TO MICHAEL LONGLEY

 

We were deeply saddened to hear of the death of Michael Longley on Wednesday 22nd January at the age of 85 from complications following a hip operation. Ireland's President Michael D. Higgins paid tribute to "one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced". Born in Belfast in 1939, Michael Longley studied classics at Trinity College Dublin and published his first collection No Continuing City in 1969. He went on to publish thirteen poetry collections including Angel Hill (2017); The Candlelight Master (2020); The Slain Birds (2022) and his New Selected: Ash Keys (2024), which was reviewed in our Autumn Bulletin

Throughout his lifetime he received many awards, including the Whitbread Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast and in 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.

In a statement released by Michael’s publisher Jonathan Cape, his long-standing editor Robin Robertson said: "It was an honour to work with him on his books from Gorse Fires in 1991 until his new selected poems, Ash Keys, published last year to mark his eighty-fifth birthday... He was the last of the great Northern Irish poetry triumvirate (with) Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon... He was a love poet, nature poet and war poet. As the third, he linked Homeric Greece to the Somme and to the Troubles – which he lived through, in Belfast – believing that all wars are, in essence, the same war. He spoke truth to power, and spoke it beautifully."

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