Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was born in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and was followed by numerous volumes of poetry, plays, criticism, and translation, establishing him as one of the leading English-language poets of his generation. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI was published posthumously in 2016 to great critical acclaim.

Christopher Reid is the author of many books of poetry, including A Scattering (winner of the Costa Book Award), The Curiosities, and The Late Sun. He also edited Letters of Ted Hughes. He lives in London.

"An epistolary cornucopia. The Letters of Seamus Heaney contains an abundance of insight and illumination, literary gossip and appraisal, playfulness and cogency, all bound up with a steadfast attention to the feelings and expectations of each correspondent. " --Patricia Craig, TLS

"The portrait of Heaney that emerges in The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited diligently and sympathetically by Christopher Reid, is of a man always tussling between duty and freedom." --Declan Ryan, Poetry Foundation

"The 700-plus pages of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, beautifully edited by Christopher Reid, contain numerous fascinating themes and subplots. . . We see the poet, for example, first getting his hands on a copy of P. V. Glob's The Bog People, the book whose account of exhumed Iron Age bodies in Denmark would trigger "The Tollund Man" and, in time, half of the poems in North." --James Parker, The Atlantic