The Annual Seamus Heaney Lecture 2023, organised by the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, in association with The Estate of Seamus Heaney, will be delivered by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, acclaimed astrophysicist from Northern Ireland, past president of the Royal Astronomical Society and past president of the Institute of Physics.
The evening will open with a reading of Seamus Heaney poems by Liverpool-born actor Paul McGann (Withnail and I, Doctor Who) and will conclude with refreshments.
Seamus Heaney was born and raised in County Derry. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and was followed by poetry, translations and criticism which established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”. Seamus Heaney died in 2013.