IRELAND's 1995 Nobel Literatare laureate, Seamus Heaney, has added yet another literary prize to his remarkable and ever expanding, collection by taking the Whitbread Book of the Year Award with The Spirit Level.
Some London critics had been hinting that the British novelist Beryl Bainbridge could win due to the critical and popular success of her Booker contender, Every Man for Himself the novel that had beaten Graham Swift's Booker winner, Last Orders, to secure the Whitbread novel award.
Other observers had fancied the chances of Diarmuid MacCulloch, winner of the biography section, with his scholarly study Thomas Cranmer: A Life.
Earlier this month Heaney won the Whitbrend poetry section of the prize, having previously won it in 1988 with The Haw Lantern collection (1987).
Heaney's £21,000 win, and indeed the collection itself - his ninth since the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1966 - is significant for several reasons.
The Spirit Level was his first collection for five years. It followed the highly acclaimed book Seeing Things, and the winning book had been written and submitted to his publisher, Faber, several months before the Nobel announcement in October 1995.
This meant, however, that The Spirit Level was assessed more as the book of a newly crowned Nobel laureate than simply as a book of poetry. Although it contains many familiar scenes and again calls upon that familiar Heaney tone of gentle lyric intimacy for so long associated with his work, there was also a new exasperation and anger in the book, strongly reflected in poems such as The Flight Path and Mycenae Lookout, the hope born of the peace process and all the despair.
