Michael Longley

Michael Longley, CBE (born 27 July 1939) is a Northern Irish poet from Belfast.

Life and career

Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. He was Professor of Poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010, 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.

In North America, Michael Longley is published by Wake Forest University Press. His wife Edna Longley is also an influential critic on modern Irish and British poetry.

Awards and honours

Gorse Fires (1991) won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The Weather in Japan (2000) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Queen's University Belfast (1995) and Trinity College, Dublin (1999) and was the 2001 recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Longley was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours. He won a 2011 London Awards for Art and Performance. His collection, A Hundred Doors, won the Poetry Now Award in September 2012.

List of works

• Ten Poems (1965)
• Secret Marriages: Nine Short Poems (1968)
• No Continuing City (1969)
• Lares (1972)
• An Exploded View (1973)
• Fishing in the Sky: Love Poems (1975)
• Man Lying on a Wall (1976)
• The Echo Gate (1979)
• Patchwork (1981)
• Poems 1963-1983 (1985)
• Poems 1963-1980 (1981)
• Gorse Fires (1991)
• Baucis and Philemon: After Ovid (1993)
• Birds and Flowers: Poems (1994)
• Tuppeny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters (1994)
• The Ghost Orchid (1995)
• Ship of the Wind (1997)
• Broken Dishes (1998)
• Selected Poems (1998)
• The Weather in Japan (2000)
• Snow Water (2004)
• Collected Poems (2006)
• A Hundred Doors (2011)

Further reading

• Allen, Michael, ed. Options: The Poetry of Michael Longley, Éire-Ireland 10.4 (1975): pp. 129–35.
• Allen Randolph, Jody. "Michael Longley, February 2010." Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010.
• Allen Randolph, Jody and Douglas Archibald, eds. Special Issue on Michael Longley. Colby Quarterly 39.3 (September 2003).
• Brearton, Fran. Reading Michael Longley. Bloodaxe, 2006.
• Clyde, Tom, ed. Special Issue on Michael Longley. Honest Ulsterman 110 (Summer 2001).
• Peacock, Alan J. and Kathleen Devine, eds. The Poetry of Michael Longley: Ulster Editions and Monographs 10, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2000.
• Robertson, Robin, ed. Love Poet, Carpenter: Michael Longley at Seventy. London: Enitharmon Press, 2009.
• Russell, Richard Rankin. Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland. South Bend: Notre Dame UP, 2010.

See also

• List of Northern Irish writers

External links

• Michael Longley at Irish Writers Online
• Template:Contemporary writers contains a "Critical Perspective" section
• Wake Forest University Press North American publisher of Longley
• Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
• Poetry archive profile and poems written and audio
• Ulster Museum portrait