In his collected letters, published last year, writing to Askold Melnyczuk (17 March 2004), Seamus Heaney appends the following:

p.s. thanks too for your Dalai Lama photo: my sister recently sent me a cutting from the British Independent: a gossip column reported that I was named – along with Dalai L., Germaine Greer and others – by a survey in Erotic Review – as among the top 50 sex gods in the world.

This led me to consider that I wasn’t the first to highlight the physical resemblance between Heaney and the Dalai Lama, a conviction first strengthened when Private Eye published (8 December 2006) thumbnail photos I’d sent them in their Lookalike column. I’d met Heaney earlier in the year, and later regretted having sent in those pictures on learning he’d suffered a stroke that summer and cancelled all public appearances. That uneasiness was reinforced, a couple of years later, when Private Eye ran a tacky parody of his work.

I’d been taught some of Heaney’s work at school; I grew up in a farming community and his was the first poetry I’d ever enjoyed. Alongside that of Louis MacNeice, which I was introduced to soon after, those poems were a factor behind my wish to study literature in Ireland – a country I’d never visited – and may have led, in some degree, to my subsequent work as a poetry editor. In my first week in Dublin, I certainly felt I’d come to the right place when, on hearing I was reading English, a total of three fellow students on separate occasions (surely this would never happen in England) ...