Seeds of Literature / Seamus Heaney, 'A Down-to-Earth Poet'?

Dr Sharon Jones, Stranmillis University College

Monday December 1 2025, 5.15-7 pm, E002 room, Amiens Citadelle Campus

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/92458971945?pwd=6c9f51UxMHca4XU9NDnQ7i4…

Born into a farming family in rural Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is one of Ireland’s best known and loved writers, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, and the prestigious Forward Prize in 2010. Although he moved away from the immediate locality of his birth, the place Heaney grew up in proved to be a rich source of inspiration throughout his work. Adopting a geo-critical lens after Westphal and Tally, this paper harnesses the concepts of mapping, translating and transcending to explore Heaney’s treatment of the land, drawing on close readings of poems included in Faber and Faber’s 100 Poems (2018). This beautiful collection curated by Heaney’s family offers a fine and accessible introduction to his remarkable poetic corpus.

Dr Sharon Jones is Senior Lecturer at Stranmillis University College in Belfast, and an inaugural Fellow of the Inklings Project, University of Notre Dame. She completed undergraduate studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University, and a doctorate in literature and theology at Ulster University. Sharon’s teaching and research interests include language, education and literature, and her academic and creative writing has been published in a range of journals and anthologies. Sharon serves currently as Chair of the British Educational Research Association’s British Curriculum Form.