Andrew Motion wins Ted Hughes award for poetry work about returning soldiers
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Version 0 of 1. Andrew Motion has won the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry for a radio programme inspired by some of the last British soldiers to leave Afghanistan. Motion was presented with the prize at a ceremony in London on Thursday evening. Established in 2009 by Carol Ann Duffy, who succeeded Motion as poet laureate, the award recognises the year’s most exciting contribution to poetry and is funded with the annual honorarium that the poet laureate traditionally receives from the Queen. Motion was named winner for Coming Home, a radio performance based on recordings he made when he met soldiers returning from Afghanistan and their families. The poems addressed the effects of war, using threads of the conversations. The prize judges were the artist Grayson Perry and the poets Kei Miller and Julia Copus. Copus said Coming Home was a deserving winner. “We loved the way in which the listener is invited in to the writing process. First, we eavesdrop on conversations with the soldiers and then we witness poems hatching from those conversations. “The author has gone to some lengths to absent himself from the lines and claims to have changed very little to produce what he calls ‘a rapid fire kind of poetry’, but don’t be fooled: Motion’s skilful shaping and alterations have resulted in a subtle and magical transformation. “All the time we are aware of a gap between the interviewees’ words and the sorrow that lies behind them. It’s this gap that Andrew Motion exploits to make accessible, innovative and deeply moving poetry.” Motion was chosen as the £5,000 winner from a shortlist that included Patience Agbabi, Imtiaz Dharker, Carrie Etter, and Alice Oswald. Motion is one of Britain’s most celebrated poets and held the title of poet laureate between 1999 and 2009. He is a professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. His programme, broadcast on Radio 4 last year, came about after he spent time at the British Army camp in Bad Fallingbostel in northern Germany interviewing returning soldiers serving with 7th Armoured Brigade, also known as the Desert Rats. In an interview with the Observer, Motion said: “Although I was only with them with them for a few days, it was extraordinarily intense and moving.” At the same ceremony, Roger Philip Dennis, an artist and art tutor, was named winner of this year’s national poetry competition, the world’s biggest international open competition for single poems. The judging panel of poets Roddy Lumsden, Glyn Maxwell and Zoë Skoulding called Corkscrew Hill Photo a “stunning poem which mixes sweetness, sentiment, the visual and a touch of the grotesque”. Lumsden said: “I couldn’t quite grasp what it was about, but in the best of ways. I wanted to reread and make my own story from what I was being offered. Like all good poems, it offered the shared experience of writership and readership. Dennis becomes the 37th person to win the annual Poetry Society competition, with its £5,000 prize. Previous winners have included Duffy, Tony Harrison, Jo Shapcott, Ruth Padel and Helen Dunmore. Dennis’s work was chosen from more than 13,000 poems. Runner-up was Joanne Key for The Day the Deer Came and third was Fran Lock for Last Exit to Luton. |