British poet and playwright Tony Harrison won the £40,000 (about $60,150) David Cohen Prize for Literature, which recognizes a lifetime's achievement by writers who use the English language and are citizens of the U.K. or Ireland.
Chair of judges Mark Lawson said Harrison "is a great poet of the private--in his early work about his upbringing and education in working-class Leeds--but also of the public: addressing social incohesion (in v and the recent British wars abroad (in A Cold Coming)). As a stage dramatist, he has made classical texts speakable and spoken-about in plays such as his muscular translation of The Oresteia and The Trackers of Oxyrynchus, an original--in every sense--drama spun from a fragment of Sophocles."
