Irish poet Michael Longley has received 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. Previous winners include WH Auden, Eugenio Montale and John Ashbery.

The Accademia dei Lincei said: “Longley is an extraordinary poet of landscape, particularly of the Irish west, which he observes with the delicate and passionate attention of an ecologist, and a tragic singer of Ireland and its dramatic history. But with his poetry he has also addressed the seduction, conquest, and fascination of love, as well as the shock of war in all ages, the tragedy of the Holocaust and of the gulags, and the themes of loss, grief and pity.”

Longley will accept the prize at a ceremony at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome later this year. He said: “I write poems in solitude. It comes as a happy surprise when other people respond to them, and when they reach audiences beyond these shores. At this terrible time, it’s also a special honour to have my poetry recognised in a European and international context.”

He has also been awarded the TS Eliot prize, the Hawthornden prize, and the Griffin International prize. In 2001 Longley received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen award. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize. 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 a new collection of poems, The Slain Birds, in September.