Michael Longley was born in 1939. He lives in Belfast where, until 1991, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. His Collected Poems was published by Cape in 2006. He has edited the Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice (recently reprinted) and 20^th Century Irish Poems (2002). His awards include the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize, and he has received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2008 he is Ireland Professor of Poetry.

David Wheatley writes: ‘Collected Poems shows Longley struggling with the desire to inscribe natural and human landscapes of loss, and the sometimes conflicting demand that poetry comfort or even just cheer us up now and then … Longley is the laureate of habitation, of the soul’s native, adoptive and imaginary dwelling places, even if underneath it all “There’s no such place as home”, as he writes in “Check-up”.’