Michael Longley, born in Belfast on 27 July 1939, was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and read classics at Trinity College Dublin. He later taught in Dublin, London and Belfast, and served, from 1970 until his retirement in 1991, as Director of Combined Arts at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The author of thirteen poetry collections, as well as many pamphlets and limited editions, Longley received countless awards, among them the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. His final collection, The Slain Birds (Cape Poetry, 2022), was followed by Ash Keys: New Selected Poems, published by Cape in 2024 to coincide with his 85th birthday. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001, and the Wilfred Owen Award in 2003. Longley 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, where he and his wife the critic Edna Longley lived and worked. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement. He died on 22 January 2025 at the age of 85. Author photo © Bobbie Harvey
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