The T. S. Eliot Prize is deeply saddened to report the death of Michael Longley on 22 January 2025 at the age of 85.
Michael Longley won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2000 for The Weather in Japan, about which Paul Muldoon, the Chair of judges, said: ‘These are poems which at first glance may seem small-scale but which always expand our sense of history, be it of ancient Greece, World II Germany or Northern Ireland. Longley is a skilled lyric poet of compassion and grace.’
Michael Longley was also shortlisted in 1995 for The Ghost Orchid, in 2004 for Snow Water and in 2014 for The Stairwell. Robin Robertson, his long-standing editor at Jonathan Cape, 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. Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect. I remember remarking in Belfast – at the launch of Love Poet, Carpenter – a festschrift marking his seventieth – that generally the only editorial input that Michael’s books ever required from me was an ISBN number.’
Longley chaired the T. S. Eliot Prize judging panel, alongside Deryn Rees-Jones and Fred D’Aguiar, in 2002. He also judged the Prize with Carol Ann Duffy (Chair) and David Morley in 2012.
Amongst many prizes and awards he won the Whitbread Prize for Gorse Fires and the Hawthornden Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize for The Weather in Japan. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and received the Librex Montale Prize, the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, the Yakamochi Medal, the International Roma Prize and in 2015 the Griffin Poetry Prize, in which year he was also honoured with the Freedom of the City of Belfast. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010, in which year he was made a CBE. In 2022, he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.
Sean O’Brien noted how Longley’s poetry evolved from ‘classically educated formalism towards conversational intimacies … His work indicates one of the gifts of the major poet, of making the one life speak for all.’ The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney regarded Michael as ‘A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.’ Longley’s own view of the poet’s task was ‘to find fresh rhythms … the only way one is going to find new vital rhythms is being vital and alive and alert and responsive oneself. To live life with all of one’s pores open.’
Michael Longley was married to the critic and academic Edna Longley, who judged the inaugural T. S. Eliot Prize in 1993. Our deepest sympathies to his family.
