Michael Longley
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. He has published eleven 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. A Hundred Doors (2011) won the Poetry Now Award in September 2012. His 2014 collection, The Stairwell, won the 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2001 Longley received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was the Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2007. In 2015, he received the Ulster Tatler Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017. In 2015 Longley was elected a Freeman of the City of Belfast. He and his wife, the academic and critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.
Sidelines: Selected Prose
Michael Longley’s prose centres on poetry. This is so, even when he is writing autobiographically, or reflecting on war and memory, or enthusing about music and painting. Since Longley writes relatively little criticism, readers of his poetry have lacked access to his aesthetic thinking. Sidelines fills the gap by assembling prose that ranges from his (often combative) youthful poetry reviews, to the lectures he gave as Ireland Professor of Poetry. Among the poets Longley discusses are Homer, Propertius, Louis MacNeice, Robert Graves, James Wright, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ruth Stone. Sidelines, which includes interviews with Longley, not only illuminates his...
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