Irish author Colm Tóibín has been named the winner of this year's David Cohen Prize for Literature.
The prize is worth £40,000 and recognises a living writer from the UK or Ireland for a lifetime’s achievement in literature.
Hermione Lee, chair of the judging panel said Colm Tóibin had been a unanimous choice for the prize.
"I think of him as a Renaissance man who can do almost everything with equal brilliance: he’s a novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, travel-writer, critic, teacher, journalist and activist for gay rights," she said.
"His novels and stories imagine their way into the lives and minds of others with amazing empathy and skill. He’s a deeply perceptive writer who can also be lethally funny and daringly erotic.
"He’s a truly international figure, and a watchful historian of our times. He’s a beautiful writer of loss and grief, silence and quietness.
"He writes with the intensity of a poet and the lyric rhythms of a musician. I have never missed a book by him and every book of his I’ve read has been a revelation. He’s one of the essential writers of our times."
Colm Tóibín said he had never imagined he would win the award.
He said: "When I attended the inaugural reception for the David Cohen Prize in London in 1993, I did not imagine for a moment that my own writing would ever be honoured in this way. Those who have won the Prize in the past are artists whose work I revere. I am proud to be among them."
Previous winners of the award include Séamus Heaney and Edna O’Brien.
Having received the David Cohen Prize, Colm Tóibín went on to award the Clarissa Luard Award to Padraig Regan. The Clarissa Luard Award was founded in 2005 by Arts Council England, in memory of a much-loved literature officer, Clarissa Luard.
The award is worth £10,000 and the winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature in turn nominates an emerging writer whose work they wish to support.
Padraig Regan is the author of two pamphlets, 'Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real’ (Emma Press, 2017) and 'Delicious' (Lifeboat, 2016).
In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize.
They hold a PhD from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, where they are currently one of the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellows for 2021. Their first book Some Integrity will be published by Carcanet in January 2022.
