Michael  Longley

Michael Longley, the Ireland Professor of Poetry, was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. He has published eight collections of poetry, including Gorse Fires (1991), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000), which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Snow Water (2004), for which he was awarded the Librex Montale Prize (Milan). His Collected Poems appeared in 2006. In 2001 Longley received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.