Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's

Belfast, Silhoutte: People-Centred Storytelling with Glenn Patterson 🐦‍⬛

This three week workshop encourages participants to explore how they can introduce a people-centered storytelling approach in their own creative practice, using examples drawn from Glenn Patterson’s work.

Each week has a specific focus with a mix of creative writing prompts and practical skills exercises to help you develop future creative projects of your own.

Participants need to be available for all three sessions. All levels of prior creative writing experience (including none!) are welcome.

Please see our website for further details and to register.

To mark the closing of the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann 2026, the Seamus Heaney Centre has been working with Seán Doherty to create a live-scored film (directed and shot by Conall McCauley) celebrating the archives of Belfast and featuring contributions from , , Áine Gordon, CLÍODHNA🌟 and and a stellar line-up of musicians.

With tributes to 18th-century musician and collector Edward Bunting, our Founding Director Ciaran Carson and fiddle player Sean Maguire, this hybrid performance is an ode to our city’s rich musical and literary heritage.

Our contribution to the closing ceremony brings together the history of artistic preservation and the living tradition in the city of Belfast. It features readings by Seamus O’Hara and others, as well as music taken from Bunting’s three volumes of The Ancient Music of Ireland.

Join us on the grounds of Belfast City Hall at 9:40pm tonight (Sunday the 9th of August).

🎻 Lá a Trí: A Short History of Happiness by Stephen Sexton 🎻

Read the poem and translation using the link in our bio, or find a copy of the pamphlet in the Seamus Heaney Centre.

Translator’s note by Cian Dunne:

This poem presented novel challenges, in dealing with its rectangular shape, its enjambments, its one continuous, complete sentence. Some of its grammar and syntax was difficult to pin down in Irish – the undefined ‘someone’ quickly becoming a ‘she’ is hard to adapt to as a reader, and harder still to adapt as an Irish translator. But, as I settled into the rhythm of its sentence and the story it unfolds, the words came easier. Though it is often required by Irish syntactical conventions, it was not obligatory in this instance that I show my hand too soon. However, with some sense of growing confidence, like a first time poker player happily shocked at having progressed to being only inept rather than completely clueless, I decided to be bullish of my own accord. So, in the original, you hear of the ‘waste-paper basket’ and the ‘magic amaryllis’ before you learn of ‘his never watering it’, before you finally know that it ‘shows new, majestic, red flowers’, in spite of all. In the Irish, instead, you hear prematurely of the flowers before you know that they miraculously exist despite never having been watered.

Earlier in the poem comes the revelatory line: ‘where history is what we call/what might have happened differently/and didn’t’. In Irish, again, I’m initially steered towards repetition, this time of the verb rather than the noun: ‘a d’fhéadfá a tharla […]/agus níor tharla.’ However, I change tack to introduce an alternative verb, ‘níor bhac.’ This I mean in the sense of, ‘neglected to’, i.e. history neglected to occur in that way, and also gesturing to our good everyman at the end, who himself was, for whatever reason, neglectful, of his flowers, who, in other words, perhaps couldn’t be bothered, and who, yet, in spite of himself, ends up smelling the roses. In this line, in Irish, I want to say ‘ach’ (but), instead of ‘and’(‘agus’), but I can’t bring myself to make the change. And yet, even so.

🎻 Lá a Dó: The grass river by Dawn Watson 🎻

Read the poem and translation using the link in our bio, or find a copy of the pamphlet in the Seamus Heaney Centre.

Translator’s note by Cian Dunne:

Translating this poem, I prioritised attention to its shape and sounds. I found the Irish surprisingly amenable when it came to adhering to the original poem’s structure, in terms of retaining the containment of the complete, one sentence lines, and also its three instances of enjambment. Most satisfying, in the fifth line, achieving that same momentum of a push off down a level into the poem’s second half: ‘I pushed’/‘Bhrúigh mé.’

The echoing ‘cling-k’ stands out and lingers in the English through its italicisation. The ring, ding of a bell in Irish may be translated as ‘cling.’ The Irish word is softer – it does not need that hard ‘k’ to signal an end. Yet for some reason I thought it could still do with it. But, Irish has no ‘k’ in its alphabet. Does ‘c’ suffice instead? I cling to the ultimate conviction that it doesn’t make all that much of a difference, to my own ears at least.

Earlier in the poem, the line ‘I pushed/my bike to the top’ caused a hitch, when I initially translated it as ‘Bhrúigh mé/mo rothar go dtí an barr.’ It’s not entirely clear what ‘an barr’ refers to here. Without the completion of ‘an chnoic’/the hill which we do deduce it refers back to, the phrase sounds somewhat incomplete on its own. It is not uncommon in similar cases in Irish to repeat the previously mentioned noun where that may not be the case in the original, to skirt this issue. Rather than repeat ‘cnoc’, however, I opt for the variety of ‘an bhinn’ (the peak or apex). I think it perhaps chimes in some way, or in my own head at least, with that concluding cling of the bell in terms of ‘binn’ in its other meaning of ‘sweet’, that is, a sweet or melodious ringing. Bing-go.

🎻 Lá a hAon: On a Paper Clip by Nick Laird 🎻

Read the poem and translation using the link in our bio, or find a copy of the pamphlet in the Seamus Heaney Centre.

Translator’s note by Cian Dunne:

The final two lines of this poem: ‘and just sufficient tension/to hold the poems together’, arriving in the opener of Up Late, prime us for the delicate considerations of the poems which are to follow. Starting out with a similar purpose, I seek to present the question of whether this translation, and those to follow over the course of the week, can transport and contain the weight of such inherent tensions. What can be gained in a given translation that may offset the realities of an inevitable loss?

This in mind, rather than choosing to translate the title’s ‘On’ in the straightforward sense of ‘about’, or ‘concerning,’ I choose ‘Faoi’ – also and more often used to mean ‘under.’ In this sense, I try to introduce the aforementioned question via the immediacy of the poem’s title: the sense of the paper clip’s, and the poem’s, potentially deceptive weight. Additionally, introducing the possibility for translation being found located a level beneath, or on the contrary, impressing its own weight upon the original poem, in some kind of roundabout way.

In terms of word choices, an ‘inflection’ suggested to me the linguistic varieties of such – voice modulation (athrú tuine) or a grammatical inflection (infhilleadh). As it was, I kept to a more stringently mathematical, geometrical sense (‘athchasadh’). Similarly, when it comes to the ‘sufficient tension’, I was tempted by the notion of a more encompassing distance or discrepancy (neamhréir) – whether between languages, modes, or practices. I might have committed to these possibilities, if I did not feel they would too far fray the carefully arranged seams as to be deemed unseemly. That they may prove míchuí (improper) instead of appropriate or ‘correct’/‘cuí’.

🏆Join us to celebrate the shortlist for The Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 🏆

Come for an evening of readings from our 2026 shortlist of the Poetry Prize, as well as announcing the winner of the prize.

The shortlist this year is: Chaotic Good, Isabella Baafi, The Storm’s Flora, Laura Wainwright Heirloom, Catherine- Esther Cowie, After Party, Dean Browne and Joy is My Middle Name, Sasha Debevec-McKenney.

The Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize is awarded to a writer whose first full collection has been published in the preceding year, by a UK or Ireland-based publisher. The winning writer receives £5,000 and is invited to participate in the Seamus Heaney Centre’s busy calendar of literary events. This year’s judges were Nick Laird, Leontia Flynn, and Karen Solie.

To register follow the link below, or click the link in our bio to see all the wonderful events coming up this June:

https://www.seamusheaneycentre.com/Events/SeamusHeaneyFirstCollectionPoetryPrizeAwardNight.html

As the Digging at Sixty: From the Archives conference draws closer, we are delighted to announce our keynote speakers. 🐦‍⬛

We are thrilled to welcome Dr Rosie Lavan, author of Seamus Heaney in Society (OUP, 2020) and co-editor of The Poems of Seamus Heaney (2025), and Professor Geraldine Higgins, Director of Irish Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, and curator of the National Library of Ireland exhibition Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again.

Join us at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, on 11th–12th of September 2026 for two days of conversations, archival discoveries, and new perspectives on Heaney’s early work, his career in broadcasting, and the importance of archives.

We are still accepting paper proposals and welcome submissions from scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students. We are particularly interested in papers that draw on archival resources and encourage participants to visit our conference partner sites.

More information, including details on how to submit, are available on our website.

The Michael Longley Scholarships offer two scholarships of £7,500 on an annual basis to assist graduates to pursue the MA in Poetry: Creativity and Criticism, in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast.

Both scholarships are open to students who have already been accepted to the MA in Poetry. Both are dependent on a short written statement. Applicants must have applied to the MA in Poetry by the deadline of Fri 29th May 2026, the deadline for written statements for the Longley Scholarships is Fri 12th June 2026.

For more information and eligibility requirements, visit https://www.qub.ac.uk/Study/AHSS/postgraduate/poetry/ or email [email protected]

Want to come to Belfast and write about the future? has 20 funded postgraduate places with the Foresighters Doctoral Training Network and the Seamus Heaney Centre is one of the institutions where you can work, supervised by Lecturer in Creative Writing or other team members. More information and eligibility criteria available at https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/foresighters/

We are delighted to announce the 2026 Shortlist for The Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize! "As the world continues to experience political turbulence, The Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize allows us to get back in touch with the careful attention to language by which we might reset it. The award is a highlight of the Seamus Heaney Centre's year." - Prof. Leontia Flynn. We'll be celebrating the entire shortlist and announcing the winner at an annual Award Night on Monday 22 June and hope you can join us there!