Beowulf Translator Wins Poetry Prize

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, perhaps best known in the wider world for his 2000 new verse translation of Beowulf, has been awarded the £10,000 TS Eliot Prize for poetry. The award was made for Heaney’s 12th collection of poems, District and Circle. The 2006 shortlist included work by Simon Armitage, Paul Farley, WN Herbert, Paul Muldoon, Penelope Shuttle and Hugo Williams.

Heaney, 67, has been ill and did not attend the ceremony. However, he issued a statement, saying that there “are many reasons to feel honoured by the award of this prize: the aura of T S Eliot's name, for a start; the distinction of the previous winners; the quality of the other poets on this year's shortlist; and the high regard in which the judges are held. When I called one of the poems in District and Circle ‘Anything Can Happen’ I wasn’t thinking that anything like this would happen to the book, but it certainly expresses what I'm feeling at the moment.”

According to The Independent, Heaney “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 then for 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.”

The Independent has the full story here.