In a move that will get London writers shifting their garrets to Sunderland, the largest literary award in Britain yesterday went to a Durham poet, specifically for living in the north.

Anne Stevenson, 69, won the first £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer Award, set up by the Newcastle-based bank for writers resident in the north-east. At three times the worth of the Booker prize, and outstripping the combined £50,000 Whitbread awards, it is the UK's biggest literary award for an individual writer.

Stevenson has published 15 volumes of poetry since 1965, with her verse described as heart-breakingly terse and "objective". A contemporary of Sylvia Plath, she published a biography of the American poet, Bitter Fame in 1989.

Stevenson grew up in the US and lived in Ireland, Scotland and the south of England before moving to Durham in 1988. She has been a Northern Arts literary fellow since the 1980s.

The poet, who will receive yearly instalments of £20,000, said: "This award comes as a confirmation or affirmation of my writing at a time when I was telling myself that I should perhaps retire from poetry."

Stevenson said the award was a tribute to the large arts scene in the north-east, which includes Booker prize-winning novelist Pat Barker, the poet and critic Sean O'Brien - twice winner of the Forward poetry prize - and the children's laureate, Anne Fine.

Stevenson said: "Only unobservant and benighted southerners who have never troubled themselves to look north of the Trent imagine that London is and will always be the only city of culture in the United Kingdom."