Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition

what is the best of the country?
blinkbonny! airgold! thundergay!

tell us about last night?
well, we had a wee ferintosh and we lay on the quiraing. it was
pure strontian!

from 'Canedolia', Edwin Morgan

Poetry Competition 2010

With a first prize of £5000 and lesser prizes of £1000, £500 and £50 (x 2), this is one of the richest poetry prizes in Britain and last year attracted over 1000 entries. This year's judges are the distinguished Scottish poets Robert Crawford and Kathleen Jamie.

A list of this year's winning poets and details of the prize-giving ceremony can now be found here.

Poet and critic Robert Crawford was born in Belshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland, in 1959, and grew up nearby. Educated at Glasgow University and at Oxford, he works as Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews. He won an Eric Gregory award in 1988 and was one of 20 poets selected for the Poetry Society's 'New Generation Poets' promotion in 1994. He has twice won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and four of his collections have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations.

 

In addition to Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots (1990),shared with W. N. Herbert, Robert Crawford is the author of six collections of poetry in English: A Scottish Assembly (1990), Talkies (1992), Masculinity (1996), Spirit Machines (1999), The Tip of My Tongue (2003), and Full Volume (2008), the latter shortlisted for the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize. He was a founder of the international magazine Verse in 1984 and worked as poetry editor for the Edinburgh publisher Polygon in the 1990s. With Simon Armitage he is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998) and with Mick Imlah he co-edited The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000). He has published several volumes of literary criticism on Scottish literature and poetry. Robert Crawford has given readings widely in Britain, Europe, and North America. He lives in St Andrews, near the sea, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A Selected Poems was published in 2005. In 2009, his book, The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography, was published and went on to win the 2009 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award.

 

Kathleen Jamie was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland in 1962. She studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. She has published several collections of poetry, including: Black Spiders (1982), The Way We Live (1987), The Queen of Sheba (1994), and Jizzen (1999). A travel book about Northern Pakistan, The Golden Peak (1993), was recently updated and reissued as Among Muslims (2002).

She has received several prestigious awards for her poetry, including a Somerset Maugham Award, a Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem), a Paul Hamlyn Award and a Creative Scotland Award. She has twice also won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her selected poems, Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (2002), which contains much of her work written before 1994, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. As well as poetry, Kathleen Jamie writes for radio, especially travel-scripts, and specially commissioned long poems. She lives in Fife and in 1999 was appointed Lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. Her poetry collection, The Tree House (2004), won the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2005 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award.

 

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