Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney will give the 2012 Poetry Day reading. Born in 1939 at his family’s farm in Northern Ireland, Heaney published his first collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, and the book won the Geoffrey Faber Prize and the Gregory Award. Heaney has gone on to issue more than a dozen collections of verse, most recently District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). The Nobel judges cited Heaney “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” He is also the author of essays and versions of Sophocles, Pushkin, and others. His 1999 translation of Beowulf was a bestseller. Heaney has taught at Queen’s University, Harvard, and Oxford. He first appeared in Poetry magazine in February 1972.

Inaugurated by Robert Frost in 1955, Poetry Day is one of the oldest and most distinguished reading series in the country. Past readers have included T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hass, and Derek Walcott.