Born: July 27, 1939
Died: January 22, 2025
Ireland has lost one of its leading literary figures following the death of the multiple award-winning poet, Michael Longley.
The last survivor of the Belfast triumvirate of poets which also included Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney, Longley infused his works with an emotional and intellectual depth garnered from a long life filled with strong loving relationships, enduring friendships and a rigorous academic curiosity.
The three men, Mahon, Heaney and Longley – whose presence heralded a rich mix of younger Belfast writers (Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian) – all published their debut collections in the 1960s and went on to become major internationally renowned poets.
A love poet, a nature poet and a war poet inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, Longley’s work courageously bore witness to the Troubles in his native Belfast, first and second World Wars and the Holocaust. He also celebrated the richness and fragility of the natural world and the love he shared with his wife, the academic and critic Edna Longley, their three children and seven grandchildren.
His 13 collections – including Gorse Fires, The Weather in Japan and The Stairwell – received many awards including the Whitbread Poetry Award, the TS Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, The Irish Timess Literature Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize. In 1994, he published an autobiographical work, entitled Tuppenny Stung, and wrote about jazz, painting and natural history.
In 2010, he was honoured with a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) award and from 2007 to 2010, he served as Ireland Professor of Poetry, a cross-Border academic post administered by Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and both Arts Councils North and South. He was a member ofAosdána, the Irish association of distinguished artists.
In 2021, a special room at Queen’s University Belfast was named the Longley room in honour of the poet and his wife. And the Michael Longley Scholarship fund was established with two scholarships to be awarded annually to outstanding poetry students.
Longley’s collections Ash Keys: New Selected Poems was published in July 2024 to mark his 85th birthday. It brought together work spanning over 50 years from No Continuing City (1969) to The Slain Birds (2022).
His best-known poem, Ceasefire, was published in The Irish Times shortly after the Provisional IRA ceasefire in 1994. In it, he compares the episode in the Iliad when Trojan king Priam must plead with the Greek warrior, Achilles, for the return of the body of his son with the reconciliation between enemies during the Northern Ireland peace talks.
Another poem, The Ice-Cream Man, was about how the owner of the shop he brought his child to had been murdered during the Northern Ireland conflict. Following a reading of this poem on the radio, Longley received a letter signed, The Ice cream Man’s Mother in which she thanked him for remembering her son. “Getting that stunning letter was one of the most important events in my life,” he subsequently said.
In an interview with The Irish Times in 2024, Longley reflected on progress in Northern Ireland since the 1998 Belfast Agreement. “I think we are getting there but it is going to take a generation and it’s going to take patience and it’s going to require everyone to lower their voices and to listen to each other and to get to know each other and to never forget the victims and their families.”
Michael George Longley grew up in Belfast with his twin brother, Peter, and their elder sister, Wendy, of London-born parents, Richard and Connie Longley (née Longworth). The family had moved to Belfast because of his father’s job as a commercial traveller for a furniture manufacturing firm. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, a boys' grammar school, before moving to Dublin in 1958 to study classics at Trinity College. His first poems were published in student magazines at that university.
An early poem, The Flying Fish, was published in The Irish Times in 1962, which began a decades-long relationship with this newspaper, as both an outlet for his poetry and a place he wrote reviews.
Trinity College was also where he met his wife-to-be, Edna Broder. Recalling his first encounters with Edna in the aforementioned Irish Times interview, he said: “I registered two things – the black raven hair and that she was brainy. One of the guiding things in my life has been intelligent women. Most men don’t like intelligent women. But I hang on their every word.” The couple married in 1964.
Friends with Derek Mahon since his Trinity days, the Longleys later got to know Seamus Heaney and his then fiancée, Marie Devlin, when Enda Longley got a lecturing post at Queen’s University prompting their move to Belfast.
Growing up in Belfast as a Protestant, Longley didn’t have any friends who were Catholic so the friendship with the Heaneys broke through these artificial boundaries. “And it was awkward for me in the late 1960s and early 1970s as I spent a lot of my time as a liberal Protestant apologising as though it was all my fault.”
Throughout his life, Longley was adamant that he was known as an Irish poet. “I’ve no doubt that I’m an Irish poet or I’m nothing,” he attested. Yet alongside this Irish identity sat the British identity inherited from his parents who moved to Belfast in 1927. His father fought at the Battle of the Somme for which he was award the Military Cross for gallantry.
Longley also drew inspiration from what he described as “the soul landscape” near the family’s second home in Carrigskeewaun, Co Mayo. During long stays there from 1970 onwards, the Longleys forged deep friendships with neighbouring writers and environmentalists Michael and Ethna Viney and ornithologist David Cabot.
Scholarly and wise, yet witty and mischievous, Longley was also generous, compassionate, self-deprecating and approachable. After some years of teaching in Dublin, London and Belfast, he joined the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. As director of combined arts from 1970 until his retirement in 1991, he developed supports for music, storytelling and community arts as well as fostering relationships with publishing houses, particularly the Blackstaff Press in Belfast.
Throughout that period and later, he became a father figure to several generations of new writers and artists. In a tribute to him, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland said he was “an advocate, a listening ear, an artist whose own high-altitude practice served as a standard against which artists came to measure their work”. That organisation also noted how, during the period of the Troubles, he fulfilled an artistic and civic role “where his quiet voice for tolerance, fairness and remembrance registered powerfully among much noisier and less helpful attitudes”.
In 2024, Double Band Films and Lone Star Productions released a remarkable BBC documentary on Longley entitled Where Poems Come From. The title refers to a typical Longley quip – when asked where poetry came from, he replied: “If I knew where poems came from, I would go there.”
Michael Longley is survived by his wife, Edna, their children, Rebecca, Daniel and Sarah, and seven grandchildren, Ben, Jacob, Eddie, Conor, Katie, Maisie and Amelia.
