Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, has died aged 74 in Dublin.
Heaney was highly regarded by the literary world, with American poet Robert Lowell calling him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats".
Heaney won numerous awards, including the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and the PEN Translation Prize in 1985 for his translation of Sweeney Astray from Irish into English. A lover of nature, his poetry often focussed on the natural landscape and human interaction with it. In 1968 Heaney was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his second collection, Death of a Naturalist, which explored rural life and adolescence.
Heaney was born on April 13, 1939 in Northern Ireland and was raised on a farm, and he was a teacher before he became a professional poet.
Ten years ago the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry opened at Queens University Belfast, which houses a record of the poet's entire oeuvre.
