Hundred Doors

Michael Longley’s thirteen collections have received many awards, among them the Whitbread Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he lived and worked with his wife, the critic Edna Longley, until his death in 2025. For his lifetime achievement in poetry he was awarded the 2022 Feltrinelli Poetry Prize, and in 2024 the International Roma Prize.

"One of the finest lyric poets of our century" -- John Burnside "Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless...he is a master in an old, great tradition" -- Elaine Feinstein The Times "In his truest and most enduring poems, Longley manages, in Yeats's words, to hold justice and reality in a single thought without doing violence to either. The many poems in which Longley succeeds in this aim are among the great poems of our time" -- David Wheatley Guardian "Longley's war poetry can stand comparison with the best of this century" Guardian "Longley's poems count the phenomena of the natural world with the particular deliberate pleasure of a lover's fingers wandering along the bumpy path of the vertebrae" -- Seamus Heaney