Irish poet Seamus Heaney wins literature prize

London, March 19: Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the David Cohen Prize for Literature on Wednesday for what the chair of judges called "the self-renewing force of his writing."

The biennial prize, funded by the John S. Cohen Foundation, honors a living writer from the British Isles for a lifetime`s achievement in literature. Previous winners of the 40,000-pound ($56,000) 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 "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. "For the last 40-odd years, Heaney`s poems have crystallized the story of our times, in language which has bravely and memorably continued to extend its imaginative reach." Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939. "Death of a Naturalist" appeared in 1966 and went on to win several prizes and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations including "Beowulf" in 1999. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Bureau Report