Heaney Accolade Is Second Irish Honour

The Co Londonderry poet and Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney has received a major national accolade, the David Cohen prize for literature.

It was two in a row for Northern Ireland as the last winner was also Irish, the poet Derek Mahon.

The David Cohen Prize for Literature, worth £40,000, is awarded every two years.

Mr Heaney - who comes from Bellaghy - was presented with the prize at a gala dinner in the British Library by the British Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

It honours a living writer from Britain and Ireland for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

Mr Heaney joins a list of previous winners which includes VS Naipaul and Harold Pinter.

Having previously won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, Mr Heaney paid tribute to previous recipients, calling them "a roll call of the best".

"There's the fact that you don't enter for it but are chosen from the wide field of your contemporaries," he added.

Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, who was Chairman of the judging panel, presented the prize.

He said that for the last "40-odd years" Mr Heaney's poems "had crystallised the story of our times, in language which has bravely and memorably continued to extend its imaginative reach".

"At the same time, his critical writing, his translations and his lecturing have invigorated the whole wider world of poetry," he added.

"Setting his name alongside previous winners does honour to the Cohen Prize, even as it honours him."

As the winner of the prize, Mr Heaney has chosen an organisation supporting young writers to receive the £12,500 Clarissa Luard Award.

(BMcC/JM)