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Poet Michael Longley dies aged 85
Michael Longley, a key figure in contemporary poetry, has died at the age of 85, his publishers at Jonathan Cape have announced.
The Northern Irish poet died on 22nd January 2025 in hospital owing to complications from a hip operation.
Robin Robertson, his long-standing editor at Jonathan Cape, said: “I knew and admired Michael Longley’s poetry before joining Secker & Warburg in the late 1980s, and so it was an honour to work with him on his books from Gorse Fires in 1991 until his new selected poems, Ash Keys, published last year to mark his 85th birthday. Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect. I remember remarking in Belfast – at the launch of Love Poet, Carpenter – a festschrift marking his 70th – that generally the only editorial input that Michael’s books ever required from me was an ISBN number.”
Robertson described Longley as “the last of the great Northern Irish poetry triumvirate" along with his close friends Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. The three men published their debut collections in the 1960s, each going on to become major international poets.
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Robertson described Longley as “unusual for working in a number of modes and excelling in all of them”.
He said he was a love poet, nature poet and war poet: “[Longley] linked Homeric Greece to the Somme and to the Troubles – which he lived through, in Belfast – believing that all wars are, in essence, the same war. He spoke truth to power, and spoke it beautifully.”
Longley was born in Belfast in 1939. He was a classics scholar at Trinity College Dublin.
For many years, Longley worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as Combined Arts Director. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of Aosdána, and a recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
He won the Whitbread Prize in 1991 for Gorse Fires and the TS Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize in 2000 for The Weather in Japan. He also received the Librex Montale Prize, the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, the Yakamochi Medal, the International Roma Prize and in 2015 the international Griffin Poetry Prize, in which year he was also honoured with the Freedom of the City of Belfast. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010, in which year he was made a CBE. In 2022, he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.
When Longley was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017, the chair of the judges, the poet Don Paterson, said: “For decades now his effortlessly lyric and fluent poetry has been wholly suffused with the qualities of humanity, humility and compassion, never shying away from the moral complexity that comes from seeing both sides of an argument.”
Longley described the task of being a poet as: “To find fresh rhythms… the only way one is going to find new vital rhythms is being vital and alive and alert and responsive oneself. To live life with all of one’s pores open.”
He was married to the critic and academic Edna Longley. They lived in Belfast and had three children.
