John Montague (1929– ) was born in New York and brought up in County Tyrone. He has published a number of volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and two volumes of memoir. Montague published his first collection in 1958 and the second in 1967. In 1998 he became the first occupant of the Ireland Chair of Poetry (virtually Ireland's Poet laureate). Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) is the most famous of the poets who came to prominence in the 1960s and won the Nobel prize in 1995. In the 1960s Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, and others, belonged to the so-called Belfast Group. Heaney in his verse translation of "Beowulf" (2000) uses words from his Ulster speech. A Catholic from Northern Ireland, Heaney rejected his British identity and lived in the Republic of Ireland for much of his later life.