Irish poet Derek Mahon (right) was last night awarded the £40,000 David Cohen Prize for Literature for 2007 for a lifetime's achievement in literature.
Presenting the prize at a ceremony in the British Library in London, the British Poet Laureate and chair of the judging panel Andrew Motion saluted Mahon as one of the most original and subtle poets writing in the English language. The award would help bring his work the wider recognition it deserved, he said.
Mahon, born in Belfast in 1941 and now living in Kinsale, Co Cork, said he liked the element of surprise attached to this award. "There you are, staring at clouds and dreaming up unrealistic projects," he said, "when the world comes and tells you you've been noticed." He also liked the distinguished company he found himself in on the roll call of writers honoured in the prize's 14-year history, including VS Naipaul, Harold Pinter, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Michael Holroyd and William Trevor.
One nice feature of this prize is that its winner gets to choose the recipient of the Clarissa Luard Award, which is worth £12,500 for a literary body that supports young writers or an individual writer under 35. Mahon gave this year's prize to his publisher, the Gallery Press, based in Co Meath. Gallery's founder and publisher Peter Fallon said it would use the money to "protect, present, promote and preserve new work in the great assembly of poetry".
The David Cohen Prize is biennial, administered by Arts Council England and funded by the John S. Cohen Foundation. The winner is decided by a panel of writers, critics and academics which this year included Anne Enright, Jackie Kay and Hilary Mantel.
Mahon, one of the school of great poets to have emerged from Northern Ireland in the second half of the 20th century which includes Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, is the author of Night-Crossing, The Yaddo Letter, The Hudson Letter, The Yellow Book and most recently Harbour Lights. He is a distinguished translator of Nerval, Molière and Racine.