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Eliot shortlist, Keats-Shelley prizes awarded

02.11.07

Scotland's Poet Laureate, Edwin Morgan, has been shortlisted for the UK's most prestigious poetry prize for a collection exploring what it means to grow old. At 87, Morgan is the oldest poet to be nominated for the £15,000 T S Eliot Prize, which rewards collections published in Britain over the past year, notes the Independent.

Meanwhile, the winners of this year's Keats-Shelley Prize Awards were announced last night. The prize awards, set up in 1998 by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, encourages talented poets and essayists of all ages and walks of life to write on Romantic themes: poems of modern relevance and Romantic inspiration, and essays on Keats, Shelley, Byron, or Mary Shelley.

The winning poets are Richard Marggraf Turley, senior lecturer in English at the University of Wales, and co-counder and co-director of the Centre for Romantic Studies, Aberystwyth; Katherine Lucas Anderson, an American poet whose work has been published frequently in the UK and the US; John Goodby, lecturer in English at the University of Swansea; and Emily Hasler, a twenty-two year old graduate from Suffolk.

The winning essayists are Adam Gygnell, a twenty-one year old undergraduate reading English at Magdalen College, Oxford for his essay '"Ye elemental Genii": Nature, the Elements and the Poet’s Mind in Shelley's poetry'; Roderick Speer, an American writer based outside Washington DC for his essay 'Scotland in Byron's Life and Poetry'; and Alex Bubb from London, currently reading English at Christ Church, Oxford for his essay 'Mary and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron's interest in Cataclysm Theories'.

This year the prizes, worth £3,000, were sponsored by Barclays Wealth, The Cowley Foundation, Department of English, University of St Andrews.

* Roland Vernon has won the Daily Mail First Novel Competition 2007. The prize includes a publishing deal worth £30,000 with Transworld.

Independent

Prize Keats-Shelley Prize Awards

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