Self-taught Irish artist Cecil King was a successful businessman, who began to paint in his mid-30s. Initially King painted in a semi-realist style. From the late 1960s figurative elements in his work were replaced by plain fields of colour and geometric forms. King was a founding organiser of Rosc. He was the subject of a major retrospective at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 1981, and a solo exhibition at IMMA in 2008. King’s work is held in numerous public and private collections. View Artist

Born near Castledawson, Co. Derry, Seamus Heaney studied at Queen's University, Belfast. His major poetry collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), and The Haw Lantern (1987), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award. His collection The Spirit Level (1996) and translation of Beowulf (1999) both won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Heaney also published several works of prose and criticism, translated two plays by Sophocles, and co-edited two selections of poetry with Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School Bag (1997). He taught English and poetry at Queen's University and at Harvard University, and was professor of poetry at Oxford University from 1989 to 1994. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1996, and elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1997. View Artist