Seamus Heaney discusses his life and work, marking the opening of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling.

THE RSL/STIRLING UNIVERSITY LECTURE

‘I crept before I walked,’ Seamus Heaney has written, and his early work appeared under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’. But for nearly half a century now he has been recognised as a towering presence in the world of poetry – though he continues to move, as one friend has noted, ‘in a serene bubble of modesty and unconcern’. Talking to his old friend Alasdair Macrae, a literary critic and retired senior lecturer, the Nobel Prize winner reflects on the creative tensions that have informed his life and work – the tension between speech and silence that he experienced as a child, between poetic freedom and political responsibility, and between succumbing to and resisting the pressures of celebrity. The conversation, which will be introduced by Professor Gerry McCormac, Principal of Stirling University, and during which Heaney will read from his work, marks the opening of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling.

We are grateful to the Derek Hill Foundation for their generous support of this event.

Recorded on Friday 14 September 2012