One of the outstanding elegists and war poets of the last four decades, Michael Longley is also preoccupied with love – that ‘No Man’s Land’, as he calls it, ‘between one human being and another’ – and with the beauty (sometimes savagery) of the natural world. Those themes – as with such predecessors as Robert Graves and Edward Thomas – are entwined throughout his writings. Seamus Heaney calls him “a custodian of griefs and wonders.” Longley’s 1991 Gorse Fires won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Subsequently, The Weather in Japan (2000) won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Longley’s recent publications include Snow Water (2004), Collected Poems (2006) and A Hundred Doors (2011). In 2001 Longley was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He divides his time between Belfast and County Mayo. Co-sponsored by the College of General Studies, the BU Center for the Humanities (BUCH), the Center for the Study of Europe, the Department of Classics (CAS), the literary journal AGNI and the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture.
