Heaney Takes Home Top Literary Award
Updated : Mar 20, 2009
Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney took home one of the most important UK literary awards yesterday. The David Cohen Prize for Literature, worth £40,000, is awarded every two years for a lifetime’s achievement.
Mr Heaney, from Bellaghy in Co Londonderry, was presented with the prize at a gala dinner in the British Library by British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, who chaired the panel of judges. Mr Motion said Heaney’s poems had “crystallised the story of our times.â€
The last winner was also Irish, poet Derek Mahon.
Mr Heaney said: “Much about the David Cohen Prize makes it highly honorific: 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; and then there’s the verification of that reference to ‘lifetime achievement’.â€
VeryHappyPig says “A four foot box, a foot for every year.â€â€¦â€¦ Mid Term Break, an amazing and heartbreaking poem by the great Seamus Heaney.
