Patrick Crotty is a Professor of Scottish and Irish Literature at the University of Aberdeen and a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. His translations from seventeenth-, eighteenth- and twentieth-century Irish verse have appeared in many anthologies. He edited Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology and is currently co-editing with Alan Riach the annotated three-volume Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first book, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.