28 Jul 2016
The MAC, Belfast

Krista Tippett with Michael Longley. 7.30pm July 28, The MAC, Belfast,  tickets £7.00 available online directly from The Mac, Belfast

Corrymeela is delighted to partner with Krista Tippett and the award winning team behind the radio show and podcast “On Being” for a series of interviews.

Krista Tippett was awarded the national medal for humanities by Barack Obama two years ago, for her work on the radio as well as her work convening civic conversations about religious, political and social fracture points. She has interviewed Archbishop Desmond Tutu, poet Mary Oliver, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Dalai Lama, as well as the late John O’Donohue and Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939. Among his many works are Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize, ‘The Weather in Japan’ (2000) which won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. His collection ‘The Stairwell’ (2014) won the prestigious International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2015. ‘Sea Asters’ is published in 2015. In March 2015, he was honored with the Freedom of the City of Belfast. Irish President Michael D. Higgins spoke of him as a remarkable man whose “poems speak for themselves – eloquent, precise and passionate, large–hearted, intelligent and above all humane.” He was born in Belfast and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution before reading Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, a student literary magazine. Michael Longley held the cross–border academic role of Professor of Poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010.