Andrews and Duff named in Ireland squad

The 1995 Nobel Prize winner has picked up the Irish Times Poetry Now Award for his 12th collection of poems Human Chain.

Heaney beat off competition from Sara Berkeley (The View from Here), Ciarán Carson (Until Before After), Dermot Healy (A Fool’s Errand) and Paul Muldoon (Maggot).

Heaney is no stranger to the award as the 71-year-old’s previous collection District and Circle won the 2006 prize.

John Banville said of Human Chain in the New York Review of Books: “In these marvellous poems, Heaney displays all that sweetness and ease of gesture, that colloquial accommodation, that are the unmissable traits of his art.

"But the thinking in these lines evinces new ‘torsions’ – a word that Heaney used tellingly in his Nobel acceptance speech – that Donne and Dowland would have recognised and approved."

Previous winners include Harry Clifton for Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, Dorothy Molloy for Hare Soup, Derek Mahon for Life on Earth and Harbour Lights, and last year’s winner Sinéad Morrissey for Through the Square Window.