February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney has won his second prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award.
The Dublin-based Heaney, 59, who is from Bellaghy, Co. Derry, took the £21,000 award last week for his translation of epic Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf."
He beat off a strong challenge from the bookies favorite and last year’s international publishing phenomenon, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" — the third of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.
Rowling’s books about an apprentice wizard have sold a staggering 28 million copies worldwide.
Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and his new success comes four years after he scooped the same prize for "The Spirit Level," and marks the fourth successive time the Book of the Year title has been awarded to poetry.
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"I am slightly bewildered," Heaney said. "I thought once was enough. I am delighted for the sake of ‘Beowulf’ itself. It’s not my original work, it’s the work of a poet of 1,000 years ago."
The only other person to have won the Whitbread twice was the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes, who was Heaney’s friend.
Heaney dedicated "Beowulf" to his friend’s memory and said the Yorkshire English that Hughes spoke was very close to the old English of the poem.
Beowulf, named after a Scandinavian hero, is set in the 6th century and involves a mix of heroic deeds, monsters, dragons and folklore.