Haynes beats Heaney to Costa crown

The Guardian
Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate who despite his pride in his Irish passport is considered the honorary heavyweight champion of British poets, was sensationally beaten last night - as boxing scribes would put it - by an outsider.

He was defeated for this year's £5,000 Costa poetry award by John Haynes, a writer with no big literary prizefighting experience. Heaney's usually overwhelming Anglo-Saxon epithets were outscored by Haynes's lighter but cumulatively telling iambic pentameters, sustained over the 52 cantos of a book-length performance.

'I'm broke, the money will be welcome,' says £5,000 prize winner John Haynes