Main content

Seamus Heaney, Poet

Lawrence Pollard talks to the Nobel-prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney about writing amid the 30 years of political violence in his native Northern Ireland

Seamus Heaney grew up as part of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland but was always cautious about taking sides in his poetry. Now aged 70, he tells Lawrence Pollard how difficult it was to negotiate a path. He describes how ideas for poems can come to him at any moment and how he always returns in his thoughts to the farmhouse of his childhood called Mossbawn.

Available now

28 minutes

Last on

Mon 18 Jan 201004:32GMT

Broadcasts

  • Sun 17 Jan 201007:32GMT
  • Sun 17 Jan 201015:32GMT
  • Mon 18 Jan 201004:32GMT

BBC World Service Archive

BBC World Service Archive

This programme was restored as part of the World Service archive project