Seamus Deane

Seamus Deane (born 9 February 1940) is an Irish poet, novelist, critic and intellectual historian.

Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Deane was brought up as part of a Catholic nationalist family. He attended St. Columb's College in Derry, where he befriended fellow-student Seamus Heaney. He also attended Queen's University Belfast (BA and MA) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (PhD). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a founding director of the Field Day Theatre Company.^[1]

Works

Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark (published in 1996) won the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature, is a New York Times Notable Book, won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, besides being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996.^[2] The novel has been translated into more than 20 languages . He was also the general editor of the monumental Field Day Anthology Of Irish Writing and of the Penguin Joyce.^[3]

Deane's non-fiction works include:

• Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (1985)
• A Short History of Irish Literature (1986)
• The French Enlightenment and Revolution in England 1789-1832, Harvard University Press, (1988)
• Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, Oxford (1997)
• Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke (2004)

His poetry includes:

• Gradual Wars (1972)
• Rumours (1977)
• History Lessons (1983)

Seamus Deane is currently the Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and a co-editor of Field Day Review, an annual journal of Irish studies. Until 1993, he was Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin. In the late 70s and 80s, he taught American college juniors part-time at the School of Irish Studies in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin.

See also

• List of Northern Irish writers

References

External links

• Faculty directory at Notre Dame