According to the BBC, Julian Barnes, known best for his novels Flaubert’s Parrot and England, England received the 2011 David Cohen Prize for Literature. Cohen Prize judges refer to this award as the UK’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The award comes with £40,000, but Barnes says the real prize is joining the list of previous winners, which includes Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark. Barnes, 65, added, that the award is “the greatest honour a British or Irish writer can receive within these islands.”

Mark Lawson, chairman of the judges, said the “already extraordinary list of David Cohen Prize-winning authors [has been] fittingly extended.” Barnes’s career had previously garnered three Booker Prize nominations in 1984, 1998, and 2005.