Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the 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. The T S Eliot Foundation took over the running of the T S Eliot Prize in 2016, appointing Chris Holifield, formerly director of the Poetry Book Society as its new director, when the former Poetry Book Society charity had to be wound up, with its book club and company name taken over by book sales agency Inpress Ltd in Newcastle. At present, the prize money is £20,000, with each of nine runners-up receiving £1500 each, making it the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry competition. The Prize has been called "the most coveted award in poetry".
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.
Brian Turner is an American poet, essayist, and professor. He won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize is Phantom Noise.
Jane Griffiths is a British poet and literary historian.
John Agard FRSL is an Afro-Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was awarded BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award in November 2021.
Paul Farley, FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
Sean O'Brien is a British poet, critic and playwright. His prizes include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems. He grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived in Newcastle upon Tyne since 1990, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford for 2016-17.
Gillian Allnutt is an English poet, author of 9 collections and recipient of several prizes including the 2016 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
David John Constantine is an English poet, author and translator.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Carol Rumens FRSL is a British poet.
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.
Matthew Gerard Sweeney was an Irish poet. His work has been translated into Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, Latvian, Mexican Spanish, Romanian, Slovakian and German.
Ken Smith was a British poet.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Maura Dooley is a British poet and writer. She has published five collections of poetry and edited several anthologies. She is the winner of the Eric Gregory Award in 1987 and the Cholmondeley Award in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize in 1997 and again in 2015. Her poetry collections Life Under Water (2008) and Kissing A Bone (1996) were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Ailbhe Darcy is an Irish poet and Wales Book of the Year award laureate.
