Media Contact: Kate Callen at (619) 534-0361 or kcallen@ucsd.edu

Photo - Seamus Heaney (25KB) (Photo Credit:  Caroline Forbes)

NOBEL LAUREATE POET SEAMUS HEANEY TO READ SELECTIONS AT FEB. 22 UCSD CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES LECTURE

Irish poet Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, will read selections from his work at a University of California, San Diego Center for the Humanities Lecture on Feb. 22 at 6 p.m. in UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium.

Heaney, a native of Northern Ireland, has been called by Robert Lowell "the most important Irish poet since Yeats," and the Columbia Encyclopedia (Fifth Edition) says Heaney "may be the finest poet writing in English today." In awarding the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy of Letters cited Heaney for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney divides his time between Dublin and Cambridge, Mass., where he teaches at Harvard University in the spring semester. The poetry selections he will read at the Center for the Humanities lecture will include poems from his new book, OPENED GROUND: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar Straus & Giroux).

Tickets to the lecture are $10 general admission, $5 for UCSD faculty and staff, and free to UCSD students (maximum two per I.D.). (Visitor parking on week nights is $3.) Tickets can be obtained at the UCSD Box Office. For ticket information, contact the Box Office at 534-4559.