The Latest Breaking News from Seamus Heaney

Actor and Beowulf scholar Felix Nobis returns to his celebrated solo performance of the epic tale Beowulf, staged for the first time in a blacksmith's workshop.

The small island has produced Nobel laureates and Booker winners and hosts a booming writing and publishing scene. What’s the secret to its success?

The poet on discovering Seamus Heaney, revisiting Alice Walker and the joy of Allan Ahlberg

The academic and author on the lessons we can learn from those who work the land, acquiring a second career in his 70s – and how he ‘dialogues’ with the spirit of Seamus Heaney

The English war poet Wilfred Owen once wrote, “Celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.” Killed in France at the age of 25, unpublished and unknown, “celebrity” for Owen was a posthumous phenomenon. By contrast, celebrity status for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney – “Famous Seamus” – came early in…

Poet and editor of the magazine Aquarius who was a charismatic figure in literary London from the late 1960s

Generosity, warmth and joie de vivre characterise this collection of the great poet’s letters

The poet laureate, who died a quarter of a century ago today, believed his Shakespeare fixation was almost fatal; his first wife, Sylvia Plath, was certainly the Titania to his Oberon. With his almost psychic connection to nature and a charisma so powerful that even the Queen was rumoured to…

The stakes couldn’t be higher. A wider war in the Middle East could embolden Russia in Ukraine and encourage China over Taiwan, says Guardian columnist Martin Kettle