Michael Longley wins Feltrinelli Poetry Prize

We are delighted to share the wonderful news that Michael Longley has received one of the major European poetry prizes, the 2022 Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry, awarded every five years by the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. The prize is one of the most prestigious European arts awards, worth €250,000, and previous winners include WH Auden, Eugenio Montale and John Ashbery.

The Accademia dei Lincei said he had won for “the extraordinary relevance of his themes and their cultural implications, as well as the very high stylistic quality of his oeuvre”. Read the full Bookseller article here. 

Michael Longley has previously been awarded the TS Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017.

In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work.

Jonathan Cape will publish his new collection of poems The Slain Birds, in September.