Seamus Heaney has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 4 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 35 ratings. The most-rated is Beowulf.
Beowulf
Summary
Translated and read by Seamus Heaney. New York Times best seller and Whitebread Book of the Year, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf comes to life in this gripping audio. Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read. Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.
©2000 Seamus Heaney (P)2000 Penguin Books Ltd., by arrangement with the BBC. Published by arrangement with W. W. Norton.
The Inferno of Dante
Summary
Robert Pinsky's new verse translation of the Inferno makes it clear to the contemporary listener, as no other in English has done, why Dante is universally considered a poet of great power, intensity, and strength. This critically acclaimed translation was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award given by the Academy of American Poets. Well versed, rapid, and various in style, the Inferno is narrated by Pinsky and three other leading poets: Seamus Heaney, Frank Bidart, and Louise Glück.
©1994 Robert Pinsky (P)2014 Penguin Audio
Seamus Heaney I Collected Poems (published 1966-1975)
Summary
Volume one of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in 2009 by RTE. Volume one contains four collections published between 1966 and 1975: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out and North.
©1975 Seamus Heaney (P)2018 Faber Audio
Stepping Stones
Summary
This selection of Seamus Heaney's poems is drawn from nine collections, including The Spirit Level, and provides a perfect introduction to the full breadth of Heaney's poetic concerns. It is a unique record of interpretation; Heaney reads with all the intimacy and authenticity that only the poet himself can bring to his work.
(P) and ©1990 Penguin Audiobooks
Seamus Heaney II Collected Poems (published 1979-1991)
Summary
Volume two of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in 2009 by RTE. Volume two contains four collections published between 1979 and 1991: Field Work, Station Island, The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things.
©1991 Seamus Heaney (P)2018 Faber Audio
Anglo-Saxon Portraits
Summary
The half millennium between the creation of the English nation in around 550 and the Norman Conquest in 1066 was a formative one. This groundbreaking series rediscovers the Anglo-Saxons through vivid portraits of 30 incredible men and women, as told by their contemporary admirers. Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney discusses the Beowulf bard; former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams focuses on St Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury; Michael Wood celebrates Penda, the much-maligned last pagan king of England; Barbara Yorke tells the story of Hild of Whitby, the powerful abbess and largely forgotten pre-feminism model; and writer David Almond investigates the oldest surviving English poet, Caedmon. From royalty to peasants, the women behind the Bayeux Tapestry to rebellious nuns, Anglo-Saxon Portraits unravels the mysteries of a too often forgotten period in British history.
©2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd