Seamus Heaney wins literature prize

Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney took home one of the most important UK literary awards, the David Cohen Prize in London on March 18.

The David Cohen Prize for Literature, worth £40,000, is awarded every two years for a lifetime’s achievement.

The last winner was also Irish, poet Derek Mahon. Previous winners of the award include fellow Nobel laureates VS Naipaul, Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing as well as Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge.

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’.”