From the Vault 384: Seamus Heaney, Poet

This week on From the Vault we honor the life of Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) with an incredible 1983 program recently digitized by Pacifica Radio Archives. Produced by venerable KPFA host Padraigin McGillicuddy, this recording features a live reading and interview with Heaney – at the time a new professor of Literature at Harvard University – a dozen years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. With an introduction by KPFK’s Alan Minsky, and commentary by Siobhán Ó Mócháin Breathnach, graduate of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry 2012 summer session in Belfast, Northern Ireland., this episode is a historical tribute to one of the great poets of our time.

From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.