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. 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".
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet.
Bernard MacLaverty is an Irish fiction writer and novelist. His novels include Cal and Grace Notes. He has written five books of short stories.
Norman Derek Mahon was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."
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.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Tobias Fleet Hill was a British poet, essayist, writer of short stories and novelist.
Jacob Polley is a British poet and novelist. He has published five collections of poetry. His novel, Talk of the Town, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2009. His fourth poetry collection, Jackself, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2016. Polley has co-written two short films and collaborated on multimedia poetry installations in the United Kingdom.
Michael Donaghy was a New York City poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.
David Gordon Brooks is an Australian poet, novelist, short-fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of four published novels, four collections of short stories and five collections of poetry, and his work has won or been shortlisted for major prizes. Brooks is a highly intellectual writer, and his fiction has drawn frequent comparison with the writers Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a poet and novelist from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Anna Burns FRSL is an author from Northern Ireland. Her novel Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
Lucy Caldwell is a Northern Irish playwright and novelist. She was the winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award and of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize.
Patrick Hicks is an Irish-American novelist, poet, and Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University.
Jamie McKendrick is a British poet and translator.
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.
Belinda McKeon is an Irish writer. She is the author of two novels, Solace, which won the 2011 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Tender (2015).
