Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Eavan Aisling Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Our Lady of Mercy College, Carysfort was a College of Education in Dublin, Ireland from its foundation in 1877 until its closure in 1988. Educating primary school teachers, and located in a parkland campus in Blackrock, it was a recognised college of the National University of Ireland from April 1975. The site is now the premises of the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, part of University College Dublin.
The Field Day Theatre Company began as an artistic collaboration between playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. In 1980, the duo set out to launch a production of Friel's recently completed play, Translations. They decided to rehearse and premiere the play in Derry with the hope of establishing a major theatre company for Northern Ireland. The production and performance of Translations generated a level of excitement and anticipation that unified, if only for a short time, the various factions of a divided community.
Richard Kerr Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet.
Seamus Francis Deane was an Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian. He was noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which won several literary awards and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.
Robert Fitzroy 'Roy' Foster, publishing as R. F. Foster, is an Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford.
Medbh McGuckian is a poet from Northern Ireland.
Leontia Flynn is a poet and writer from Northern Ireland.
"Pangur Bán" is an Old Irish poem, written in about the 9th century at or near Reichenau Abbey, in what is now Germany, by an Irish monk about his cat. Pangur Bán, 'White Pangur', is the cat's name, Pangur possibly meaning 'a fuller'. Although the poem is anonymous, it bears similarities to the poetry of Sedulius Scottus, prompting speculation that he is the author. In eight verses of four lines each, the author compares the cat's happy hunting with his own scholarly pursuits.
Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.
Desmond Carolan Fennell was an Irish writer, essayist, cultural philosopher, and linguist. Throughout his career, Fennell repeatedly departed from prevailing norms. In the 1950s and early 1960s, with his extensive foreign travel and reporting and his travel book, Mainly in Wonder, he departed from the norm of Irish Catholic writing at the time. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, in developing new approaches to the partition of Ireland and the Irish language revival, he deviated from political and linguistic Irish nationalism, and with the philosophical scope of his Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World, from contemporary Irish culture generally.
Kathy Rose O'Brien is an actress from Dublin, Ireland, who has appeared in the Irish television drama Whistleblower, which dealt with the controversial events at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda relating to obstetrician/gynecologist Michael Neary, and in theatre productions including Leaves, The Burial at Thebes, The Birthday Party, The Fall of Herodias Hattigan and The Plough and the Stars. She holds a BA (Hons) in Drama and Theatre Studies from The Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College Dublin and graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2006.
Carolyn MulhollandHRHA, HRUA is an Irish sculptor.
Edna Longley is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry.
That part of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland was created in 1922, with the partition of the island of Ireland. The majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted to remain within the United Kingdom. Most of these were the Protestant descendants of settlers from Great Britain.
Mary Mulvihill was an Irish scientist, radio television presenter, author and educator. She founded and served as the first chairperson of Women in Technology and Science (WITS), and is viewed as a pioneer of science communication in Ireland. She was featured in Silicon Republic's 100 Top Women in STEM list.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation is a verse translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf into modern English by the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. It was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Faber and Faber, and won that year's Whitbread Book of the Year Award.
Christopher J. Horn is an Irish academic and businessperson, co-founder and CEO of Ireland's first NASDAQ-listed company, IONA Technologies, once one of the world's top ten software-only companies by revenue. He also led fundraising for, and became founding chairperson of, Dublin's Science Gallery, and later its international spinoff projects. Horn, an electronics engineer and holder of a PhD in computer science, has also written extensively on technology and business innovation, and on privacy, including for The Irish Times. A former president of Engineers Ireland, and later made a Fellow of that body, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin, and a Gold Medal of the Royal Dublin Society. He has been chairperson or member of multiple commercial and voluntary boards, including those of Trinity College Dublin and Science Foundation Ireland.
The 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He is the fourth Irish Nobel laureate after the playwright Samuel Beckett in 1969.
