**Note that this event has been postponed from May 14. A new date will be confirmed as soon as possible.**
The 2024 Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture is presented by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, in partnership with Queen's University Belfast.
Note that this event will take place at the Seamus Heaney Center, Queen's University, Belfast. All times are in G.M.T.
The 2024 Lecture with Seán Hewitt
This lecture will explore moments of touch in Heaney's poetry. From the proximity of strangers, the intimate sensitivity of the skin, to the way words might "enter" the material world, the lecture will also make a case for the body as a primary instrument of reading, and will explore the sensuous demands that lyric poetry makes on us.
Seán Hewitt is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire (Cape, 2020), winner of the Laurel Prize, and Rapture's Road (Cape, 2024). His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Cape, 2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. A collaboration with the artist Luke Edward Hall, 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, was published in 2023, and his debut novel, Open, Heaven, will be published in 2025. He is assistant professor at the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Booking information coming soon.
About the Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture
The Seamus Heaney Memorial Lecture series was inaugurated in 2014, marking the first anniversary of the poet's death on August 30, 2013.
Heaney had a special relationship with the Keough-Naughton Institute and the University of Notre Dame. He visited the university in 1994 and 2003, giving poetry readings to overflowing auditoriums. In 2008, University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. awarded Heaney an honorary degree at the Keough-Naughton Centre in Dublin. He was lifelong friend of Seamus Deane, the initial Donald and Marilyn Keough Chair of Irish Studies; the pair met as schoolmates at St. Columb’s College, a Catholic boys' grammar school in Derry, Northern Ireland.
While difficult to measure his influence, in response to Heaney’s passing, then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny said, “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people. He belongs with Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett in the pantheon of our greatest literary exponents.” This annual event honors his memory and his outstanding contributions to Irish and world literature.