FINISHERS OF THE Dublin Marathon on Sunday were awarded a medal with a typo on the back, which said famed poet William Butler Yeats was a “Noble Prize” winner, instead of a Nobel Prize winner.
On top of that, the quote on the front, attributed to Yeats by the medal, was not certain to have been said by him, according to the Director of the Yeats Society, Susan O’Keefe.
The line – “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met” – is often attributed to him, but O’Keefe said no hard evidence exists to prove they were his words.
After posts on social media called out the Dublin Marathon organisers for the misspelling, they responded to say they pride themselves on their “high event standards,” but they “have fallen below those standards in the medal design for 2023″.
We will putting [sic] in place a more robust sign-off process for 2024. We are also looking into a new approach to our medal design.
The full quote on the back of the medal reads: “One of Ireland’s famous literary sons and its foremost poet, this commemorates his 1923 Noble Prize win.”
W.B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature a century ago for his “always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”.
He considered the prize less for himself than for his country, calling it Europe’s welcome to the Irish Free State.
Yeats’ Nobel Prize medal was donated in 2016 to the National Library of Ireland, where it joins his personal library and papers.
Over 22,000 people registered for the Dublin Marathon this year, and for the first time, runners could classify themselves in a new non-binary category.
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