Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated at The Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. He has published eight collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His most recent collection Snow Water (2004) won the Librex Montale Prize (Milan). His Collected Poems was published in 2006.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of Aosdana. He was the winner of the American Ireland Fund Literary Award in 1996. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He is the present Ireland Professor of Poetry. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.