Hear the Forward Prizes podcast

For twenty years, the Forward Prizes have recognised the best contemporary poetry. Set up by William Sieghart of the Forward Arts Foundation in 1992, the prizes are given in three categories:

• The Forward Prize for Best Collection
• The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection
• The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in memory of Michael Donaghy

Poets such as Seamus Heaney, Sean O’Brien, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes have won the Best Collection category. The First Collection prize has boosted the early careers of our best contemporary voices including Don Paterson, Simon Armitage, Kate Clanchy and Robin Robertson. The shortlists in 2011 are:

The Forward Prize for Best Collection

(£10,000 – sponsored by the Forward Arts Foundation)

John Burnside         Black Cat Bone            

David Harsent         Night                                        

Geoffrey Hill            Clavics                                         

Michael Longley      A Hundred Doors                    

D Nurkse                 Voices Over Water                        

Sean O’Brien          November        

 

The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection

(£5,000 – sponsored by Felix Dennis and the Forward Arts Foundation)

Rachael Boast         Sidereal                                             

Judy Brown              Loudness                                          

Nancy Gaffield         Tokaido Road                                   

Ahren Warner          Confer                                               

John Whale              Waterloo Teeth                                 

Nerys Williams          Sound Archive                                  

 

The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in memory of Michael Donaghy

(£1,000 – sponsored by the Forward Arts Foundation)

R. F. Langley            To a Nightingale                           

Alan Jenkins             Southern Rail (The Four Students)           

Sharon Olds             Song the Breasts Sing to the Late-in-Life Boyfriend                      

Jo Shapcott               Bees 

The judges, chaired by former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion are: the Editor of Poetry Review Fiona Sampson; poet and teacher Leonie Rushforth; author Lady Antonia Fraser; and journalist Sameer Rahim.  

To mark the anniversary a special anthology, Poems of the Decade, will be published on National Poetry Day, 6 October, featuring a selection of the best poems from the last ten years, selected by William Sieghart. The Forward Book of Poetry 2012, an anthology of poems from this year’s Prizes highly commended by the judges, will be published on the same day. William Sieghart says: “Twenty years on from the beginnings of the Forward Prizes, we’re thrilled to still be showcasing the work of established and new faces in poetry....contemporary poetry is as strong today as when we began”. 

The winner of the Forward Prizes will be announced on Wednesday 5 October, the eve of National Poetry Day, at a ceremony in Somerset House, London. Here's a little more information about the contenders:

John Burnside        Black Cat Bone                               

John Burnside’s latest collections of poetry are Gift Songs (2007) and The Hunt in the Forest (2009). His collections The Asylum Dance (2000) and The Good Neighbour (2005) were both shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). John is also the author of a collection of short stories, Burning Elvis (2000), and several novels, including The Devil's Footprints (2007), shortlisted for the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). John Burnside's memoir, A Lie About My Father, was published in 2006, and a sequel, Waking Up in Toytown, in 2010. In 2008, he received a Cholmondeley Award. He is a former Writer in Residence at Dundee University and now teaches at the University of St Andrews.

David Harsent          Night                                    

David Harsent has published nine collections of poetry. The most recent, Legion, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry prize.

Geoffrey Hill             Clavics                                           

Geoffrey Hill was elected the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2010. He previously taught at Leeds, Cambridge and Boston University, Massachusetts. His twelfth collection of poems, A Treatise of Civil Power, appeared in 2007, following Scenes from Comus (2005) and Without Title (2006). His Collected Critical Writings (Oxford University Press, 2008) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

Michael Longley     A Hundred Doors                        

Michael Longley was born in Belfast and read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published eight collections of poems including Gorse Fires (1991), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006. In 2001 he won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was awarded a CBE in 2010. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2008-2010.

D. Nurkse                  Voices Over Water                        

D. Nurkse lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has published nine collections of poetry, most recently Burnt Island (2003) and The Border Kingdom (2008). He has also written on human rights issues and worked with Amnesty International USA.

Sean O’Brien             November                                      

Sean O’Brien has written six previous collections of poetry, most recently The Drowned Book (2007), which won the Forward and TS Eliot prizes. Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 appeared in 2002. His other work includes the book of essays The Deregulated Muse (1998), verse plays The Birds (2002) and Keepers of the Flame (2003), and a translation of Dante’s Inferno (2006). In 2008 his collection of short stories, The Silence Room, was published, followed in 2009 by his novel Afterlife. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Rachael Boast          Sidereal                                            

Rachael Boast was born in Suffolk in 1975 and recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews. Her work has appeared in Ambit, Poetry Wales, and The Yellow Nib, and in the Long Lunch Press anthology, Addicted to Brightness.

Judy Brown             Loudness                             

Judy Brown was born in Cheshire and studied English at the universities of Cambridge and Newcastle- upon-Tyne. Judy’s pamphlet, Pillars of Salt, was published by Templar Poetry in 2006. Her poems have also appeared in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010), edited by Roddy Lumsden, and The Forward Book of Poetry 2006 as well as magazines such as Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Smiths Knoll, Stand, The North and The Rialto. She won the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize and the 2009 Poetry London Competition. In 2005 she received the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Poetry Prize.

Nancy Gaffield        Tokaido Road                             

Nancy Gaffield was born in the United States and lived in Japan for many years. Nancy is Senior Tutor and Director of Learning and Teaching at the Centre of English and World Languages at University of Kent. Her academic interest is post-war American poetry and poetics. Tokaido Road has been selected as a Poetry Book Society recommendation (2011) and her poems have appeared in various magazines and publications including The Bow-Wow Shop, Magma and Stand.

Ahren Warner          Confer                                            

Ahren Warner was born in 1986 and grew up in Lincolnshire. He has published his work widely in magazines and anthologies, including Identity Parade and Voice Recognition from Bloodaxe, and in Re:, a pamphlet from Donut Press. He received an Eric Gregory in 2010 and is completing a PhD in philosophy and literature at the University of London.

John Whale              Waterloo Teeth                            

John Whale was born in Liverpool in 1956. He is Professor of Romantic Literature at Leeds University and co-edits the international literary quarterly Stand. He has written on a wide range of authors in the period 1780 to 1830, including John Keats, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey, and on contemporary English poetry.

Nerys Williams         Sound Archive                          

Nerys Williams is from Carmarthenshire in West Wales. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar’s Award at UC Berkeley. A recent winner of the Ted McNulty Poetry Prize, she lectures in American Literature at University College, Dublin. She has published poems and critical essays widely and is the author of A Guide to Contemporary Poetry as well as a study of contemporary American poetry, Reading Error.

RF Langley               To a Nightingale                           

RF Langley, who died in January 2011, taught English and Art History in Midlands schools before retiring in 1999.  His work has appeared in pamphlets, journals and anthologies including The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999).  As well as several small-press publications, two collections were published by Carcanet, Collected Poems (2000), shortlisted for the Whitbread prize for poetry, and The Face of It (2007).

Alan Jenkins             Southern Rail (The Four Students)       

Alan Jenkins was born in 1955 and brought up in London. He studied at the University of Sussex and received an Eric Gregory Award in 1981.  He has worked for the Times Literary Supplement since 1981, as deputy editor and poetry editor. He was also a poetry critic for The Observer and the Independent on Sunday from 1985-1990. His collections  of poetry include Harm ( Chatto, 1994), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection; The Drift ( Chatto, 2000), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice;  A Short History of Snakes: New and  Selected Poems (Grove Atlantic, 2001); A Shorter Life (Chatto, 2005), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection; The Lost World (Clutag Press, 2010), and Blue Days: The Sailor's Return ( Redstone Press, 2010).

Sharon Olds              Song the Breasts Sing to the Late-in-Life Boyfriend           

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and lives in New York. Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her other recent collections include One Secret Thing (Random House, 2008); Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf); and The Unswept Room (2002). Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006.

Jo Shapcott               Bees                                                

Jo Shapcott was born in London in 1953. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (2000), consists of a selection of poetry from her three earlier collections: Electroplating the Baby (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Phrase Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). She has also won the National Poetry Competition twice. Together with Matthew Sweeney she edited an anthology of contemporary poetry in English, but gathered from around the world, entitled Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (1996). Her collection Of Mutability was shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best Collection) 2010 and won the Costa Book of the Year 2010.

 

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