QUEEN'S University has announced a £4.9m new landmark venue for the new Seamus Heaney Centre, which will open to staff, students and the public in early 2024.
The reimagined space at the historic listed buildings at 38-40 University Road and 3 Mount Charles are just a short walk from the main Lanyon building at the heart of the Queen’s campus.
The new venue represents the next chapter for the centre, whose original building was opened at a ceremony attended by Seamus Heaney himself in 2004.
The centre will feature an expanded poetry library, a large venue space, teaching rooms, academic offices, a ‘scriptorium’ with individual work stations for up to thirty students, and an exhibition area to display the Seamus Heaney archive held by Queen’s, providing for the first time a focal point to promote the literary heritage of the university and Belfast.
The centre will also create a Visiting International Seamus Heaney Chair in Creative Writing, bringing expertise and new perspectives to the expanding list of degree courses and activities and engagement programmes with educational and community groups in Belfast and across the North.
Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, Professor Glenn Patterson, said: “It is an enormous pleasure to be able to announce this next stage in the development of the Heaney Centre, further honouring the legacy of Seamus Heaney – Nobel Laureate, Queen’s graduate, honorary graduate, lecturer and one of Ireland's greatest poets – twenty years after the centre was founded under first director, the late Ciaran Carson.
“The new Centre allows us to build on the academic and artistic achievements of those first twenty years and to look with confidence to the next twenty – and more – with greater scope for engagement with the wider literary community.
“In this new shared space we will create a centre that looks out, speaks out, and writes out confidently into the world. A centre with Heaney at its heart, a centre where writing lives.”
Welcoming the building, Catherine Heaney, daughter of Seamus and member of the centre Advisory Board, said: “The Seamus Heaney centre is really important to me and my family because it’s about education.
"Queen’s is where my father started writing poetry, where he studied himself and started his career as a lecturer and an educator.
"It’s very much part of his writing past and the amazing thing about the centre is that it’s carrying that into the future.”
