Michael Longley


Michael Longley, is an Anglo-Irish poet.

Life and career

Michael Longley was born in Belfast 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 2007-10, 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.
His wife, Edna, is a critic on modern Irish and British poetry. They have three children. Their daughter is artist Sarah Longley. An atheist, he 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 .

Awards and honours

Gorse Fires won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The Weather in Japan won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin and was the 2001 recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Longley was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire 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 Tattler 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."

List of works