Live Relay: Seamus Heaney Tribute

Due to popular demand we are hosting a live relay of the sold out Hall One event in Hall Two.

Poet in the City presents a special tribute to the work of Seamus Heaney, the much loved Nobel Prize winning poet, who died in 2013. Widely regarded one of the greatest contemporary poets in the world, Seamus Heaney's work has a power and influence which is set to endure.

Acclaimed poets Bernard O'Donoghue, Tom Paulin and Leontia Flynn will present insights into Heaney's work from the early collections to the Nobel Prize and to his lasting impact on poetry today.

It will feature live readings of many of his greatest poems, from the celebrated actor Stephen Rea.


Bernard O'Donoghue is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where he teaches Medieval English. He has published five collections of poetry, Poaching Rights (1987), The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder (winner of the 1995 Whitbread Award for Poetry), Here Nor There (1999) and Outliving (2003). His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008.

Tom Paulin has published eight collections of poetry as well as a Selected Poems 1972-1990, two major anthologies, two versions of Greek drama, and several critical works. His most recent collection of poems is The Road to Inver (2004). He is also the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.

Stephen Rea is a celebrated film and stage actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his lead performance as Fergus in the 1992 film The Crying Game. Founder of the Field Day Theatre Company with Brian Friel, Stephen directed the premiere of Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy in 1990.

Leontia Flynn's most recent poetry collection Profit and Loss, was published in September 2011, was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Leontia has been Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast, since 2005