Seamus Heaney, the eldest of nine children of Margaret and Patrick Heaney, was born on April 13, 1939, at the family farm in Mossbawn, Ireland. Heaney received a degree in English from Queen's College in Belfast in 1961. After earning his teacher's certificate in English from St. Joseph's College in Belfast the following year, Heaney took a position at the school as an English teacher. During his time as a teacher at St. Joseph's, Heaney wrote and published work in the university magazine under the pen name Incertus. In August of 1965, Heaney married Marie Devlin, and the following year he became an English literature lecturer at Queen's College in Belfast. After the birth of his first son Michael in 1966, Heaney wrote and published a volume of poems entitled Death of a Naturalist. The volume went on to receive the E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Heaney's second son Christopher was born in 1968, and his only daughter Catherine Ann arrived in 1973. After the death of his parents, Heaney published the poetry volumes The Haw Lantern, which includes a sonnet sequence memorializing his mother, and Seeing Things, a collection containing numerous poems for his father. Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Swedish Academy of Letters described as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.
