Michael Longley, 1939-2025

Michael Longley at the Corrymeela Peace Center in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, in July 2012.

The Institute is saddened to hear of the death of Michael Longley CBE, one of the world’s most highly regarded poets and a former IASH Fellow.

Michael was an Isabel Dalhousie Fellow in 2013, along with his wife, Professor Edna Longley. The Fellowship was created by Sir Alexander McCall Smith and named after the heroine of The Sunday Philosophy Club, one of his successful series of novels. While at IASH, Michael worked on his tenth collection, The Stairwell, which won the 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize. In his Griffin Prize acceptance speech, Michael said he had been writing since he was 15 years old:  “It’s my life. It’s my religion. It’s the way I make sense of the world.” 

Michael published numerous volumes of poetry since he produced his first collection No Continuing City (Macmillan) in 1969. In 1991, he won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and he was also the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2001, the Hawthornden Prize, the PEN Pinter Prize and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. His books include Angel Hill, and he was editor of Robert Graves: Selected Poems published by Faber in 2018. Professor Edna Longley is Professor Emerita at Queen’s University Belfast, and in 2024, was awarded an honorary CBE for work as a poetry critic, and her services to academia and the arts. Our thoughts are with Edna and the family.

If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there.

- Michael Longley

BBC obituary

Penguin Books obituary

 

Image via Wikimedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.