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Mimi Khalvati awarded King's Gold Medal for Poetry
Mimi Khalvati will be awarded The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2023 for “her outstanding talent and ability to draw on diverse cultural traditions – Iranian, English and American – to enrich British poetry”.
The award committee is chaired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage who described Khalvati as a “pioneering and adventurous voice”.
Carcanet has published Khalvati since 1991 and will bring out her collected poems in November 2024.
Her last book, Afterwardness, was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card and a Sunday Times Book of the Year.
Khalvati said: “When I first received news of my award, I felt amazed, incredulous and not a little terrified. But more than that, I just felt happy. To receive such an affirmation of my work and to be numbered among the wonderful poets who have been previous recipients is an honour and privilege.”
She added: “I started writing late in life and have always felt myself to be serving an unending apprenticeship, steeped in the process of becoming a poet, and never actually being one. But now, in my 80th year, I am! And through my writing years I have been lucky enough to see many barriers of gender, age, ethnicity, fall, and to be welcomed into a community of poets, many of whom I have worked with, shared poems with and learned from. Having lost ties to my country, Iran, but finding a home in English poetry, often universal in outlook and excitingly porous to other cultures, has been made all the more precious to me by this generous recognition.”
Armitage said: “Since the early ’90s Mimi Khalvati has been a pioneering and adventurous voice in the mainstream of British poetry, bridging cultural and linguistic traditions between her native Iranian heritage and the country where she came to live. Endlessly imaginative and playful, her work weaves social and political concerns with personal history and private experience.
“She is a highly-respected teacher and supporter of new writers, especially of women poets who have been inspired by her example, her natural talent and her encouragement. Mimi receives the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry in respect of a body of published work that includes eight outstanding full-length collections, and in recognition of her tireless work as a tutor and as one of the founding members of The Poetry School.”
Michael Schmidt, m.d. of Carcanet Press, commented: ‘‘It’s a particular joy when a poet and friend of long standing – over 30 years since we published her first Carcanet book – gets the King’s Gold Medal, an honour that isn’t competed for but that just happens, a stroke of unanticipated recognition. Mimi is the most generous of poets, a sharer of her own skills as well as her own work, an incomparable mentor and advocate. What an accolade for her, and for poetry!”
Last year’s winner was British poet Selima Hill. Khalvati will be the 54th recipient of the award, which was instituted by King George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then Poet Laureate John Masefield.
