Reuters reports that Seamus Heaney has won the 40,000 pound ($56,000) David Cohen Prize for poetry.
"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 "crystallized 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," Motion said.
The judges said the liked the "self-renewing force" of Heaney's. Heaney also won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Reuters 
