Stephen Regan

Stephen Regan is Professor Emeritus at Durham University and also a research associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He previously taught at Ruskin College, Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (OUP, 2004), The Sonnet (OUP, 2019) and The Penguin Book of Elegy, co-edited with Andrew Motion in 2023 (reviewed in ABR in May 2024). He is currently editing three volumes of The Oxford History of Poetry in English.

Stephen Regan reviews ‘The Letters of Seamus Heaney’ edited by Christopher Reid

July 2024, no. 466 • 21 June 2024

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The ... (read more)