In 1970, Heaney arrived in California with his family to spend the academic year in the UC Berkeley English department, where Caitlin’s father, Tom, was a professor.

Seamus Justin Heaney was born April 13, 1939, into a Catholic farming family in rural County Derry in Northern Ireland. There seemed no preordination of his literary success: His father kept and ...

Searching inside ‘The Letters of Seamus Heaney’ for the poet (and myself) The massive 800-page collection includes messages written by the Nobel Prize winner around the time Lawrence WIlson ...

For Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan — who grew up in a family of Berkeley, California, academics — that includes her unlikely life-long connection with Nobel-prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney ...