The 2025 Seamus Heaney Lecture: ‘Politics and the Poet' by Sir Simon Schama

The Annual Seamus Heaney Lecture 2025, organised by the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, in association with The Estate of Seamus Heaney, will be delivered by historian and broadcaster Sir Simon Schama on the topic of ‘Politics and the Poet'. The evening will open with a reading of Seamus Heaney poems by Liverpool-born actor Leanne Best.

Sir Simon Schama, CBE, FBA is Professor of Art History and History; author of 18 books translated into 20 languages, including Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, Rough Crossings, The American Future: A History, Belonging, short-listed for the Baillie-Gifford Prize and Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations.
He was The New Yorker magazine’s art critic in the 1990s for which he won the National Magazine award and is currently Contributing Editor of the Financial Times. He is the writer and presenter of more than fifty television documentaries for the BBC, PBS and the History Channel, made over a quarter of a century, and including the Emmy-winning Power of Art. Those series including the 15-part A History of Britain, The Story of the Jews, Civilisations and this year alone The Story of Us and The Road to Auschwitz.
He has written fiction (Dead Certainties) and theatre (Decade, commemorating 9/11) for Rupert Goold's Headlong Theatre with whom he also collaborated on a stage version of Rough Crossings which was also a 90-minute docudrama for the BBC. His television work has won numerous awards, and he has been nominated for BAFTAs for many of his series.
In 2019, he was awarded a knighthood for services to history at Buckingham Palace.

Leanne Best was born in Liverpool in 1980 and learned her craft at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). On graduation she reluctantly left her home city for London before making her television debut in Casualty in 2004. Since then she has appeared in numerous small screen roles, including in Ripper Street, Home Fires, Line of Duty and Undercover. Leanne has made many stage appearances, principally in her native Liverpool at the Playhouse and Everyman Theatres, playing such varied roles as Lady Macbeth, Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and Rita in Educating Rita. On the big screen she had the title role in The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death as well as being part of the fighting force in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens.

Seamus Heaney was born and raised in County Derry. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and was followed by poetry, translations and criticism which established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”. Seamus Heaney died in 2013.

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