BANVILLE WINS BOOKER Defying oddsmakers, John Banville won the 2005 Man Booker Prize last night for his novel “The Sea.” The 59-year-old Banville, one of the most critically esteemed Irish writers now at work, has written 14 novels, and his criticism appears regularly in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic. He beat out five competitors, including Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro, in what the judges’ chairman, John Sutherland, called a close, “painful” decision. According to reports in the Guardian newspaper, Mr. Sutherland’s vote for Mr. Banville broke what had been a deadlock between “The Sea” and Mr. Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.”

Mr. Banville’s chief glory is his prose style, elegant and coolly voluptuous, which has earned comparisons to Nabokov and Henry Green. In “The Sea,” that style becomes the perfect voice for Max Morden, the middle-aged widower who narrates a melancholy and finally shocking story of loss. Max, an art historian, responds to his wife’s death from cancer by returning to the Irish seaside resort where he spent summers as a child. Alternating between recent and distant memories, Max gradually reveals both the cold, rather unlikable man he has become and the childhood trauma that made him that way. The novel’s conclusion carries a double surprise, which sheds a moving new light on the story Max seemed to have been telling all along.

“The Sea” is scheduled for publication in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf in March 2006.

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MORE PRIZE NEWS The poetry world goggled in 2002 when pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly bequeathed an estimated $100 million to the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine. One of the first fruits of the gift was the establishment of the Pegasus Awards, a group of new literary prizes designed to “honor achievements not already acknowledged by other poetry awards.”

Last week, the second annual winners were announced. The Emily Dickinson First Book Award, for a poet over age 50 who has never published a collection, went to Landis Everson, whose work has not appeared even in magazines since the 1950s. In his youth, the 79-year-old Everson was a friend of “Berkeley Renaissance” poets like Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, and his work shares something of their spare, strong language. He receives $10,000, and his prizewinning manuscript will be published by Graywolf Press.

The Mark Twain Poetry Award, which recognizes “a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry,” was given to Tony Hoagland. Mr. Hoagland’s poetry is comic (his most recent collection is titled “What Narcissism Means to Me”), but it is not simply light verse. More like Billy Collins than Ogden Nash, he uses anecdotes, sly observations, and self-deprecating wit to construct sincere and open-hearted poems. The Twain Award carries a prize of $25,000.

Finally, the eminent poet-critic William Logan received the first Randall Jarrell Award, “for criticism aimed at a large general readership rather than an audience of specialists.” Mr. Logan, whose biannual chronicles for the New Criterion are eagerly read and debated in the poetry world, writes with more of Jarrell’s confidence, irreverence, and wit than any poetry critic today, making him a fitting choice to inaugurate the $10,000 award.