Michael Longley has been described ‘one of the finest lyric poets of our time’. He has published eight collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award, The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T S Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Award, and Snow Water (2004). Collected Poems (2006) assembles the work of over forty years. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of Aosdána, and the current holder of the Ireland Chair in Poetry. In 2001 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.