Seamus Heaney honoured with top poetry award
Tuesday January 16 2007
At a ceremony in London last night, the Nobel Laureate was named the winner of the 2006 TS Eliot Prize, worth €15,000.
In a strong field that included work by Simon Armitage, Paul Muldoon and Hugo Williams, Heaney triumphed with his collection 'District and Circle'.
Sean O'Brien, the writer who chaired this year's judges, said: "Seamus Heaney's 'District and Circle' is a commanding, exhilarating work. In an outstandingly strong field, this was an exceptional collection of poems."
But the 67-year-old writer, who has been unwell recently and has not been undertaking public engagements, did not attend the ceremony to hear his victory announced by Valerie Eliot, TS Eliot's widow.
At the ceremony, which was attended by all the other shortlisted poets, poet Bernard O'Donoghue read from Heaney's work.
'District and Circle' is Heaney's 12th collection of poems. The poem which gives the collection its name harks back to a summer in the early 1960s when the poet spent rush hours travelling to work on these London Underground lines and makes links to both classical and contemporary concerns.
Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, praised "the undiminished freshness of his response to time-honoured things" in the new poems, while the New York Times critic said 'District and Circle' "brims with lovely evocations, reconstructions, restorations."
Sion Hamilton, poetry buyer at Foyles bookshop, said the prize, first awarded in 1993 and now supported by the TV broadcaster Five, always produced an upsurge in sales for the winning title.
"The TS Eliot prize has become a highly prestigious literary award. It seems almost incredible that Heaney has never won before. Winning the prize really affirms a poet's standing. Even though it is awarded to a particular title, it reflects on all the hard work the poet has put in over the years."
Seamus Heaney was born in Co Derry in 1939, the son of a farmer and cattle-dealer and the eldest of nine children.
His first collection of poetry, 'Death of a Naturalist', was published in 1966 and he went on to produce poetry, criticism and translations that have made him a leading poet of his generation.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award - for 'The Spirit Level' and his translation of 'Beowulf'.
He was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2001 for 'Electric Light' but Anne Carson took it that year with 'The Beauty of the Husband'.
He was beaten to the Costa Poetry Award (the re-branded Whitbreads) this year by John Haynes (70), whose 'Letter to Patience' had been rejected by several publishers.
Seamus Heaney has lived in Dublin since the 1970s and has spent regular periods teaching in America, most notably at Harvard University.
- Louise Jury
