IRISH-BORN, Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney was yesterday conferred with an honorary doctorate from St Andrews University at the first of seven graduation ceremonies due to take place this week.

Mr Heaney (66) received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at the ceremony held in the Younger Hall.

In his address, fellow writer and poet Professor Douglas Dunn, of the School of English, said that in his “amazingly productive” poetic career Seamus Heaney has been obliged to endure political turbulence and all the taunts and taints of sectarianism.

He added, “In the midst of such unenviable stresses, and the pressure to ‘say something,’ Seamus Heaney has conducted himself with integrity and dignity, displaying an exemplary loyalty to the principles of poetry—and he has done much in his criticism to define these for our time—as well as loyalty to the people he comes from.”

The eldest of nine children, Mr Heaney is a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast.

He was appointed Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard in 1985, and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1989-94. He is a well-travelled poet and a widely translated one, international in scope as well as reputation.

As well as many books of poems, Mr Heaney has published volumes of essays and lectures, edited anthologies, and published translations, including his version of Beowulf.

His poetry first came to public attention in the mid-1960s.

In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees and is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1996, subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.