Her Grace The Duchess of Abercorn OBE

Sacha Abercorn is descended, through her maternal line, from the Romanovs and from Natalya, youngest daughter of Alexander Pushkin.

She came to live in Ireland when she married James Hamilton, then MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, in 1966. Her first child, James, was born in 1969, her daughter, Sophie, in 1973 and her younger son, Nicholas, in 1979. Her husband succeeded his father as Duke of Abercorn in 1979. and dedicates his time and energy to the social and economic regeneration of Northern Ireland.

During the mid-1970s, the Duchess trained as a professional counsellor in transpersonal and depth psychology, employing methodologies learned from (among others) Jung, Maslow,
Progoff and Assagioli.

Living through the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland made the Duchess increasingly aware of the trauma sustained by children in the province. She also became aware of their urgent need to express their thoughts, their feelings, their inner worlds - to find a 'voice' of their own, and to find means whereby that 'voice' could be heard. This led to the establishment of the Pushkin Prizes in
1987.

After the Omagh bomb in 1998, the Duchess became a trustee of the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation. In 2003, the Duchess received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ulster. In the same year, she published a volume of prose poems, Feather from the Firebird. In 2006, the Ireland Fund of Monaco presented her with the Princess Grace Humanitarian Award and she was also awarded the OBE in 2008 for her services to charity.

SEAMUS HEANEY

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939, the eldest of a farming family from County Derry in Northern Ireland. He grew up in the countryside and attended his local primary school there. Although he moved further away from his home base as he grew older and his career developed, much of his poetry is still grounded in this ‘country of the mind’.

When he was twelve, Seamus won a place at St. Columb’s College in Derry and this departure from Mossbawn, the place of his childhood was to be significant and the start of a series of life moves to Belfast, Dublin and some extended annual periods of teaching in America. He has noted the initial move from the family home as a removal from ‘the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education’.

At college he studied Latin and Irish, followed by Anglo-Saxon while a student at Queen’s University, Belfast. These three areas of language have always been influential in his poetry, none more so than Gaelic heritage which ‘remains culturally and politically central’ to his work.

His poems first came to public attention in the 1960s when he was an active member of a group of poets in Northern Ireland which some have referred to as the ‘Northern School of Irish writing.’ This group included, amongst others, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon. He was also closely associated with the Field Day Theatre Company, founded in 1980 by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea.

After a year away from Ireland, during which he was a visiting lecturer at Berkeley, The University of California, he resigned his post as lecturer at Queen’s University to work as a full-time poet and writer, initially moving to County Wicklow with his wife and family. In 1984 he was named Boylston Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric and Oratory and in 1989 was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University for five years.

He has been the recipient of a number of honorary degrees, is a member of Aosdána and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. This was followed in 1996 by his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature and he was awarded a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government.

His many collections of poetry include Death of a Naturalist; Door into the Dark; The Haw Lantern; District and Circle etc. Other works include a translation of Beowulf.

MICHAEL LONGLEY

Poet, Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and at Trinity College Dublin, where he read Classics. He was also a teacher for a time at schools in Belfast, Dublin and London. He joined the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1970 where he initiated programmes in literature and the traditional arts which emphasised the importance of arts in education.

His early retirement in 1991 coincided with the publication of his first collection of poetry for twelve years, Gorse Fires, which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. His collection, Poems 1963-1983 was reissued the same year and a new anthology, The Ghost Orchid, appeared in 1995. A further anthology of his Collected Poems was published in 2006 and he was appointed Professor of Poetry for Ireland in 2007. This is the first cross-border academic chair in Ireland, established in 1998 and is held for three years.

WE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU

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