Literature Nobel Awarded To Irish Poet

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In conferring the prize, the Swedish Academy praised Heaney “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

It also praised Heaney, a Roman Catholic, for analyzing the violence in Northern Ireland without recourse to conventional terms.

The poet (whose name is pronounced SHAY-muss HEE-nee) will receive the award Dec. 10 at a ceremony in Stockholm, along with the Nobel winners in physics, chemistry, economics and medicine, who will be announced next week.

This year the prize is worth more than $1 million, the highest it has ever been.

Paul Muldoon, an Irish poet teaching at Princeton University, said, “This is a great day for Irish poetry and for poetry throughout the world.”

Heaney’s son, Michael, said in Dublin that his father was on vacation in rural Greece and that not even family members had been able to reach him.

Heaney, 56, was born on a farm west of Belfast in County Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of nine children. He received a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature at Queen’s University, Belfast.