Born in 1939 in County Derry, in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney would go on to become a world-renowned poet, playwright and translator. He attended Queen’s University in Belfast, before training as a teacher at St. Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast. He married Marie Devlin in 1965 while he was at St. Joseph’s and they would go on to have 3 children: Michael, Christopher and Catherine. Heaney taught for several years in Belfast and was a visiting professor in English at the University of California, Berkeley for 1970-1971. The following year, in 1972, he moved to Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland, and began writing on a full-time basis. In 1976 he and his family moved to Dublin, where he would stay for the rest of his life, bar short periods in the USA. He was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard from 1984-1995 and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989-1994. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and has been described as "the greatest poet of our age". Heaney was one of Cooke's closest friends, with their shared interest in lakes, water and the natural world, as well as poetry and visual art.