Thursday, October 04, 2007

Forward Poetry Prizes 2007

Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book won the UK Forward Prize for Best Collection last night. O’Brien becomes the first poet to win the award on three occasions, and last year he won Best Individual Poem as well. Not bad going!

I haven’t read the book, although I’m sure the award is deserved. He’s a good writer. I also suspect the fact that he’d won the award twice before would have been more likely to predispose the judges against choosing him a third time than the other way round, so they must have been impressed.

Winner of Best Individual Poem was Alice Oswald with Dunt from Poetry London. I’m sure last year The Guardian had all the short-listed poems printed online, but there’s no sign of that this time round.

Winner of Best First Collection was Daljit Nagra with Look We Have Coming to Dover! Does anyone else think that Daljit Nagra and Morrissey have an uncanny resemblance?

Daljit Nagra:










Morrissey:

3 comments:

Colin Will said...

I'm reading Sean's collection just now, and it's outstanding. Daljit's collection is startlingly original - a worthy winner of the First Collection category. He gave a very good reading at StAnza this year, and he joined in the sing-song session with Ruth Padel, Pascale Petit, Jackie Kay (and her mum and dad), myself and others. I haven't read the Alice Oswald poem yet, so I can't comment on that.

Ms Baroque said...

Rob, that's really funny. The difference is that Morrissey is a miserable old git.

Unknown said...

Nicely spotted Rob. And Morrissey is miserable except, according to the lyric, when he's in the haze of a drunken hour...