Michael Longley: Belfast poet wins €250,000 Feltrinelli Poetry Prize

Michael Longley, a poet from Belfast, has received a €250,000 (£216,000) European cultural award. At a ceremony in November, Longley will accept the Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry. Former winners of the award include John Ashbery, Eugenio Montale, and WH Auden.

Longley was born in 1939, and at the age of 30, he released No Continuing City, his debut book of poetry. From 2007 to 2010, he served as Ireland’s professor of poetry. Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei bestows the prize once every five years in each discipline, on a national and international level.

According to the Accademia dei Lincei, Mr. Longley won because of “the extraordinarily relevant nature of his ideas and the cultural ramifications they have, as well as the very high level of stylistic excellence of his work.”

It read: “Longley is a tragic singer of Ireland and its dramatic past and an amazing poet of landscape, especially of the Irish West, which he examines with the careful and passionate attention of an ecology.

But he has also addressed subjects such as loss, grief, and sympathy in his poetry, as well as the seduction, conquest, and enchantment of love, the shock of war in all times, the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the gulags.

The Belfast native’s parents, both Londoners who emigrated to Northern Ireland prior to the birth of their son, were both World War One veterans from England.

He and his twin brother were born on July 27, 1939, in Lower Crescent, a neighbourhood off University Road in Belfast, only weeks before World War Two broke out.

Both the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (also known as Inst) and Trinity College in Dublin, where Longley later studied classics, had an impact on his career.

When he “fell in love very strongly” with a girl from a local school, Methodist College, he began his writing career in his early teens.

He was given the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001, as well as the Wilfred Owen Award in 2003. In 2010, he was appointed CBE.

For his contributions to literary and cultural life in Belfast, where he and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, reside and work, he was given the freedom of the city in 2015.

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