Fiona Benson (poet)

Last updated

Fiona Benson
Born1978
Wroughton, Wiltshire, England
OccupationPoet
NationalityBritish
Education St. Andrew's University
Notable worksBright Travellers
Notable awards Forward Prize (2019)

Fiona Benson (born 1978) is an English poet. Her collections have been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2014 and 2019. Vertigo and Ghost (2019) won the Forward Prize for Poetry for Best Collection. [1]

Contents

Biography

Benson was born in Wroughton, England. [2] She received her Master of Letters and PhD in English from Saint Andrew’s University, Scotland, where she wrote her dissertation on the Ophelia figure in Early Modern Drama. [3] She is resident in Thorverton, Devon.

Benson was a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2006. The award is given by the Society of Authors to British poets under 30. Her work was included in Faber New Poets (2009) and her debut collection, Bright Travellers was published in 2014 by Cape Poetry. [4]

Benson was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for her poetry collection, Bright Travellers (2014) and also for Vertigo and Ghost (2019). [5]

Ben Wilkinson, in a review of Bright Travellers for The Guardian , describes Benson as "a poet whose dark imagination mixes solemnity with lyricism, treating the poem as a kind of secular prayer." [6] Themes in Benson's work include "violence and loss, shown most vividly in her accounts of motherhood, are paired seamlessly with moments of great tenderness" [5]

The poem "Androgeus" was shortlisted for The 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. It comes from a long mythic sequence retelling the minotaur myth, which tries to reinstate Pasiphaë, the minotaur’s mother, at the centre of the story. This is included in her latest collection, Ephemeron (2022). [7]

Awards

YearTitleAwardCategoryResultRef
2006 Eric Gregory Award Won [8]
Faber New Poets AwardWon [8]
2014Bright Travellers T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlisted
2015Geoffrey Faber Memorial PrizeWon [9]
Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry PrizeWon [8]
2019Vertigo and Ghost Forward Prizes for Poetry collectionWon [1]
T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlisted
2021"Androgeus" Forward Prizes for Poetry Single PoemShortlisted

Work

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pascale Petit (poet)</span> French-born British poet

Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.

The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Oswald</span> British poet

Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sinéad Morrissey</span> Northern Irish poet (born 1972)

Sinéad Morrissey is a Northern Irish poet. In January 2014 she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection On Balance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forward Prizes for Poetry</span> British poetry award(s)

The Forward Prizes for Poetry are major British awards for poetry, presented annually at a public ceremony in London. They were founded in 1992 by William Sieghart with the aim of celebrating excellence in poetry and increasing its audience. The prizes do this by identifying and honouring talent: collections published in the UK and Ireland over the course of the previous year are eligible, as are single poems nominated by journal editors or prize organisers. Each year, works shortlisted for the prizes – plus those highly commended by the judges – are collected in the Forward Book of Poetry.

David Harsent is an English poet who for some time earned his living as a TV scriptwriter and crime novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Burnside</span> Scottish writer

John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book. In 2023 he won the David Cohen Prize.

Leontia Flynn is a poet and writer from Northern Ireland.

Robin Robertson is a Scottish poet.

Michael Symmons Roberts FRSL is a British poet.

Paul Farley FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Copus</span> British poet, biographer and childrens writer

Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.

Jean Sprackland is an English poet and writer, the author of five collections of poetry and two books of essays about place and nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Bird</span> British poet, playwright and author (born 1986)

Caroline Bird is a British poet, playwright and author.

Selima Hill is a British poet. She has published twenty poetry collections since 1984. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the most important British poetry awards: the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was selected as recipient of the 2022 King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Esther E. Morgan is a British poet.

Liz Berry is a British poet. She has published three pamphlets and two full-length poetry collections. Her debut collection, Black Country, was named poetry book of the year by several publications, including The Guardian.

Mary Jean Chan is a Hong Kong-Chinese poet, lecturer, editor and critic whose debut poetry collection, Flèche, won the 2019 Costa Book Award in the poetry category. Chan’s second book, Bright Fear, was published by Faber in 2023. In 2023, Chan served as a judge for the Booker Prize.

Will Harris is a London-based poet of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage. His debut poetry book RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021. His poem SAY was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2018. In 2019, Harris received a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Falling Awake (poetry collection)</span> 2016 poetry collection by Alice Oswald

Falling Awake is a 2016 poetry collection by English poet Alice Oswald, published by Jonathan Cape. Her seventh book of poetry, it won the 2016 Costa Poetry Award and the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Fiona Benson wins Forward prize with Greek myth poems for #MeToo age", Guardian 20 October 2019
  2. "Fiona Benson | Forward Arts Foundation". www.forwardartsfoundation.org. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  3. "Interview: Fiona Benson". Granta Magazine. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  4. Wilkinson, Ben (23 May 2014). "Bright Travellers review – Fiona Benson's first collection of poetry". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  5. 1 2 "Fiona Benson. The Confessional". The Economist. Retrieved 30 August 2018.
  6. Wilkinson, Ben. "Bright Travellers review – Fiona Benson's first collection of poetr". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 August 2018.
  7. Forward Arts Foundation. Fiona Benson
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 "Fiona Benson". Forward Arts Foundation. Retrieved 30 August 2018.
  9. "Fiona Benson". The Poetry Society. Retrieved 30 August 2018.
  10. Poetry Book Society