Seamus Heaney Lecture 2024: ‘A cobble thrown a hundred years ago' by Professor Clair Wills

The Annual Seamus Heaney Lecture 2024, organised by the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, in association with The Estate of Seamus Heaney, will be delivered by Professor Clair Wills (King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge) on the topic of ‘A cobble thrown a hundred years ago'. The evening will open with a reading of Seamus Heaney poems by Irish actress Irish actress Denise Gough and will conclude with refreshments.

‘A cobble thrown a hundred years ago'

Professor Clair Wills will be thinking about public and private homes and forms of family inheritance. She will be asking how should we approach the aftermath of the scandals of institutional abuse in Ireland? What questions should we be asking about guilt, blame and responsibility?

Professor Clair Wills is a critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916, The Best Are Leaving, The Family Plot: Three Pieces on Containment, and most recently Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets. Wills is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge.

Irish actress Denise Gough’s work includes Duncan MacMillan’s award-winning play, People Places and Things, which earned her an Olivier Award and a Critics Circle Theatre Award for ‘Best Actress’. She also starred in Angels in America at the National Theatre where she won her second Olivier Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, before heading to Broadway with the production and receiving a Tony Nomination. Other theatre credits include the title role in Portia Coughlan at The Abbey in Dublin, The Duchess of Malfi at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and Desire Under the Elms, which saw her win the ‘Most Promising Newcomer’ at the Critics Circle Theatre Awards, The Kindness of Strangers at the Liverpool Everyman, and By the Bog of Cats at the Wyndham Theatre. Denise’s film credits include Monday, directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall and the BAFTA nominated ’71 from director Yann Demange. Her television credits include Disney Plus series Andor, Under the Banner of Heaven, Too Close, for which she received a BAFTA nomination for Leading Actress, the title lead in Conor McPhersons’s BBC2 Thriller Paula.

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.