Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the David Cohen Prize for Literature today for what the chair of judges called "the self-renewing force of his writing".
The biennial prize, funded by the John S. Cohen Foundation, honours a living writer from the British Isles for a lifetime's achievement in literature.
Previous winners of the £40,000 (€43,000) award include fellow Nobel laureates V.S. Naipaul, Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing as well as Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge.
"Much about the David Cohen Prize makes it highly honorific," Heaney (69), said in a statement. "First of all there's the list of the previous winners, 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."
Poet laureate Andrew Motion, who chaired a panel of judges, said Heaney's poems had "crystallised the story of our times.
"The self-renewing force of his writing, and the sheer scale of his achievement make the award of the Cohen Prize an absolutely right and proper act of recognition," he said. "For the last 40-odd years, Heaney's poems have crystallised the story of our times, in language which has bravely and memorably continued to extend its imaginative reach."
Heaney was born in Co Derry in 1939. Death of a Naturalistappeared in 1966 and went on to win several prizes and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations including Beowulfin 1999.
Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, and District And Circle, his 11th collection, was awarded the TS Eliot Prize in 2006.