Edwin Morgan has beaten illness and writer's block to win the £25,000 Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year last night with a new collection of poems.

When A Book of Lives was published last year, it followed a long period of illness for the 88-year-old poet. It proved well worth the wait: the writer Kathleen Jamie described it as “Olympian a in democratic way”, adding: “Thank God we have Edwin Morgan to show us how to live, and keep on living.”

Critics said that the collection was a distillation of the many themes and styles that have staked out Morgan's poetic world. Confronting global issues such as the war on terror and historical events closer to home, including the Battle of Bannockburn, it is also a book filled with intimacy.

The book opens with a poem to the inauguration of the Scottish Parliament. “What do the people want of the place? /They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture./ A nest of fearties is what they do not want.”

Morgan said of his book: “I believe there are no barriers in subject matter or style in poetry. And you can only persuade people of that if you're actually writing it. If it's any good, the collection must be more than just a book of lives. The title is meant to set you off thinking, off on a course of ideas.”

Morgan's book was chosen from among four categories winners. Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy won best work of fiction, Robert MacFarlane's exploration of wild Britain, The Wild Places, won best work of non-fiction and Jane McKie's poetry collection, Morocco Rococo, was selected as the outstanding first book. They each won £5,000.

The awards were announced last night at the Border Book Festival in Melrose, at an event hosted by the comic impressionist Rory Bremner.

Gavin Wallace, chairman of the judging panel, said that the judges had faced a difficult task. “A Book of Lives is a prodigious creative achievement by any standards from a poet who is, arguably, not just Scotland's greatest living poet, but one of the greatest in English-language poetry world-wide.”

Previous winners of the award include the poet Norman MacCaig and the novelists A.L.Kennedy and James Robertson.

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