Michael McLaverty (5 July 1904 – 22 March 1992) was an Irish writer of novels and short stories.
[3] McLaverty was one of Ireland's most distinguished short story writers, painting with spare intensity the northern landscape of his homeland, the hill farms, rough island terrain and the backstreets of Belfast.
His collected stories are illustrated with woodcuts by Barbara Childs, and including an introduction by Seamus Heaney and a foreword by Sophia Hillan,[4] Heaney summarised McLaverty's contribution: "His voice was modestly pitched, he never sought the limelight, yet for all that, his place in our literature is secure."
In the introduction to McLaverty's Collected Short Stories, Heaney describes the writing: "His tact and pacing, in the individual sentence and the overall story, are beautiful: in his best work, the elegiac is bodied forth in perfectly pondered images and rhythms".
[5] Heaney's poem Fosterage, in the sequence Singing School from North (1975) is dedicated to him.