A Lavish Talent for Friendship: Heaney the Letter Writer

The steady rise in Seamus Heaney’s cultural prominence that gathered pace on the publication of North in 1975 and reached one of its summits twenty years later when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature has shown no sign of dropping away since his death. Heaney was so intimately familiar a figure – and not only in his native Ireland – that his demise on 30 August 2013 seemed untimely, albeit, at seventy-four, he had lived longer than W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and even W. B. Yeats.