Michael Longley: 1939 – 2025

Jonathan Cape is deeply saddened to announce the death of Michael Longley, a key figure in contemporary poetry since he first published his work in the early 1960s. Michael died on 22 January 2025 at the age of 85 in hospital owing to complications after a hip operation.

Michael was born in Belfast in 1939. He was a classics scholar at Trinity College Dublin. His immersion in these works led to his expertise in the cadences of classical metre and with Greek and Roman mythology, particularly Homer and Ovid, although his life in Northern Ireland contributed to the great complexity of his poetic universe – friendship, love and aesthetics contend with war, death and violence, and his ability to distil such themes into concentrated forms was remarkable. His deep love of the natural world was also evident throughout his work, as in the many poems set in the west of Ireland, notably Carrigskeewaun in County Mayo (of which he said, ‘It’s the most magical place in the world for me. It’s the Garden of Eden’).

Sean O’Brien noted how Longley’s poetry evolved from ‘classically educated formalism towards conversational intimacies … His work indicates one of the gifts of the major poet, of making the one life speak for all.’ Douglas Dunn viewed his verse as ‘one of the most distinguished accomplishments in contemporary poetry’. Other writers and critics referred to his work’s tremendous mnemonic qualities; and, as with much of Edward Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Keats, who were all great influences, his work lends itself to the ear and to memory. His metrical effects were delivered with great subtlety in a voice of gentle inflection. Michael referred to his pursuit of ‘those moments when language itself takes over the enterprise, and insight races ahead of knowledge’.

For many years Michael worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as Combined Arts Director. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of Aosdána, and a recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Amongst many prizes and awards he won the Whitbread Prize in 1991 for Gorse Fires and the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize in 2000 for The Weather in Japan. He also received the Librex Montale Prize, the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, the Yakamochi Medal, the International Roma Prize and in 2015 the international Griffin Poetry Prize, in which year he was also honoured with the Freedom of the City of Belfast. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010, in which year he was made a CBE. In 2022, he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.

On being awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017, the chair of the judges, the poet Don Paterson, noted: ‘For decades now his effortlessly lyric and fluent poetry has been wholly suffused with the qualities of humanity, humility and compassion, never shying away from the moral complexity that comes from seeing both sides of an argument.’ The late poet John Burnside simply called him ‘One of the finest lyric poets of our century.’ The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney regarded Michael as ‘A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.’

Michael’s own view of the poet’s task was ‘to find fresh rhythms … the only way one is going to find new vital rhythms is being vital and alive and alert and responsive oneself. To live life with all of one’s pores open.’

Michael was married to the critic and academic Edna Longley, who had a deep editorial relationship to his work (and of whom he said, ‘if it wasn’t for her, my oeuvre would be three times the size’). They lived in Belfast and had three children. Our thoughts are with them all, and his wider family.

Robin Robertson, Michael’s long-standing editor at Jonathan Cape, says:

I knew and admired Michael Longley’s poetry before joining Secker & Warburg in the late 1980s, and so it was an honour to work with him on his books from Gorse Fires in 1991 until his new selected poems, Ash Keys, published last year to mark his eighty-fifth birthday. Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect. I remember remarking in Belfast – at the launch of Love Poet, Carpenter – a festschrift marking his seventieth– that generally the only editorial input that Michael’s books ever required from me was an ISBN number.

He was the last of the great Northern Irish poetry triumvirate. He and his close friends, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, were part of a loose, convivial and brilliantly disparate group of young Irish writers (including Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon) who met in Philip Hobsbaum’s ‘Belfast Group’ in the early 1960s. The three men published their debut collections that decade and went on to become major international poets.

Michael was unusual for working in a number of modes and excelling in all of them: a love poet, nature poet and war poet. As the third, he linked Homeric Greece to the Somme and to the Troubles – which he lived through, in Belfast – believing that all wars are, in essence, the same war. He spoke truth to power, and spoke it beautifully.