Michael Longley was born on 27 July 1939 in Belfast, the eldest of twin boys. His parents, Richard and Constance Longley, were both from England, and moved to Belfast in the 1920s. Michael Longley  is a poet from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Longley was educated at Belfast’s Royal Academical Institution, and then, from 1958-1963, at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied Classics. He is one of a generation of poets in Ireland who brought about a new ‘renaissance’ in Irish writing from the 1960s onwards.

He became Director for Literature and the Traditional Arts with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1970. His first publication of note was Ten Poems (1965), which appeared during the Belfast Festival of 1965 with pamphlets by Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, marking the emergence of Ulster poetry. His collections of verse include No Continuing City(1969), An Exploded View (1973), Man Lying on a Wall (1976), The Echo Gate (1979), Poems 1963–1983 (1985), Gorse Fires (1991), and Ghost Orchid (1995). In 2001 Longley was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.