Thursday, January 19, 2006

Lesbian Poet Wins Top Literary Prize


(Link) Carol Ann Duffy bested most of the UK's straight poets in winning the TS Eliot award. Said the judges: "[her work] re-animates and continues a long tradition of the poetry of love and loss."
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LNewsEditor said...

JIC Post:
From BBC News

Poet Carol Ann Duffy has won the TS Eliot Prize for Rapture, her latest collection of verse.

The Glasgow writer beat poets including Polly Clark, David Harsent and Sinead Morrissey to the £10,000 prize.

Rapture was described as "coherent and passionate" by judges who named it the best collection of new poetry published in the UK and Ireland.

Awarded by the Poetry Book Society, the prize was presented by TS Eliot's widow Valerie at a London ceremony.

Duffy, 50, read philosophy at Liverpool University before editing poetry magazine Ambit.

She previously won the Whitbread Poetry Award and Forward Poetry Prize for her 1993 collection Mean Time. She was made an OBE in 1995.

Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, having written works such as Take My Husband, Loss and Little Women, Big Boys.

Rapture is a highly personal collection of love poems which move from first encounters to rows, adultery, parting and recrimination.

David Constantine, chair of the judges, said: "In the language and circumstances of our day and age, it re-animates and continues a long tradition of the poetry of love and loss."

TS Eliot was a founder member of the Poetry Book Society in 1953.

The awards were introduced in 1993 to mark its 40th anniversary, with past winners including Ted Hughes, Don Paterson and Alice Oswald.

1/19/2006 11:12 AM

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