Irish poet Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939. In this episode, Longley discusses growing up in Northern Ireland where he wrote his first poems at sixteen to impress a girl he fancied. He then leads us to life in Trinity College, Dublin, his friendships with Derek Mahon and Brendan Kennelly and the effects the Northern Ireland conflict had on his writing. He openly discusses the creative act of writing – poetry as human expression, its bravery, and its roots ‘in song and dance, in spell and in curse and in prayer’.