Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney has won the Truman Capote Award for literary criticism, it was announced today in the United States.
Heaney, who received the Nobel literature prize in 1995, will receive a $50,000 prize for the anthology Finder Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001.
Author of such poetry collections as Death of a Naturalistand Door Into the Dark, Heaney won universal acclaim for his translation of Beowulf.
The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, which administers the prize on behalf of Capote's literary estate, announced the award in New York.
Books of general literary criticism in English, published during the past four years, were eligible for nomination.
The Capote award was established in 1994 in memory of the celebrated American novelist and journalist who died in 1984.