Poetry in the News: 2005

30 November 2005: The Poetry Archive, an online initiative which allows people to listen to poets reading their own work, has launched today.

30 November 2005: As part of the Poetry Society's ongoing 'Poetry Laboratories' launched on National Poetry Day, Zeeba Ansari is being interviewed on BBC Radio Cornwall this afternoon about the role that Cornwall libraries are playing in getting the county listening to the Poetry Archive. For more information click here.

25 November 2005: W.S. Merwin has won the poetry category of the US National Book Awards for his collection Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press).

16 November 2005: The shortlist for the Whitbread Poetry Award 2005 has been announced. On the shortlist are David Harsent for Legion (Faber & Faber), Christopher Logue for Cold Calls (Faber & Faber), Richard Price for Lucky Day (Carcanet) and Jane Yeh for Marabou (Carcanet). Category winners will be announced on 4 January 2006.

14 November 2005: Dr Robert Woof, director of the Wordsworth Trust, has died after a battle with cancer. He has been involved with the trust for 35 years and was its first director, a post he took up in 1992. Obituaries appeared in the Guardian and the Times.

11 November 2005: Magma magazine readers have chosen John Masefield's 'Sea-Fever' as their favourite sea poem in a poll organised by Magma and SeaBritain 2005.

11 November 2005: Victor Selwyn, editor-in-chief of the Salamander Oasis Trust, has died at the age of 88. He helped to found the trust which collected and published poetry by servicemen of the second world war. An obituary appeared in the Guardian.

8 November 2005: Five performance poets have been shortlisted for a major award from the Arts Foundation. Zena Edwards, Kat Francois, Matt Harvey, Shamshad Khan and Tim Turnbull will perform before a panel of judges at an event at the Royal Festival Hall on 1 December and a winner will be announced on 26 January 2006.

7 November 2005: The winner of the 18 and under category of the 2005 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation is James Potts. He was one of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year in 2004. Two runners-up in this category, Chloe Stopa-Hunt and Adrian Pascu, have also previously won or received a commendation in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. The open prize was won by an anonymous translator for a version of Rilke's 'Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes'.

5 November 2005: The shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2005 is Polly Clark, Take Me with You (Bloodaxe), Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture (Picador), Helen Farish, Intimates (Cape), David Harsent, Legion (Faber), Sinead Morrissey, The State of the Prisons (Carcanet), Alice Oswald, Woods etc. (Faber), Pascale Petit, The Huntress (Seren), Sheenagh Pugh, The Movement of Bodies (Seren), John Stammers, Stolen Love Behaviour (Picador), Gerard Woodward, We Were Pedestrians (Chatto). Judges David Constantine, Kate Clanchy and Jane Draycott will announce the winner on 16 January 2005.

5 November 2005: The winner of this year's Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2005 is Nick Laird for To A Fault (Faber).

31 October 2005: Valeria Melchioretto has won the inaugural New Writing Ventures Award for poetry. She receives £5000. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines, including the autumn 2005 issue of Poetry Review.

20 Oct 2005: Mario Petrucci won first prize in the London Writers Competition for the fourth time in the last twelve years. His latest collection is Heavy Water (Enitharmon).

18 October 2005: The shortlist for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2005 is Living on the Difference by Mike Barlow (Smith/Doorstop), Gogol in Rome by Katia Kapovich (Salt), To A Fault by Nick Laird (Faber), Lucky Day by Richard Price (Carcanet), The Point of Splitting by Sally Read (Bloodaxe) and Ways of Returning by Linda Saunders (Arrowhead). The winner will be announced at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on 5 November.

14 October 2005: Ruth Padel will be talking about poetry, the brain, and the role of the unconscious in inspiration this Saturday on The Verb at 9.45pm on Radio Three. The programme also features poetry from Rommi Smith about memories of Africa.

National Poetry Day - 6 October 2005: The winner of the Poem for Space poll is Adrian Mitchell's 'Human Beings'.

TheFoyle Young Poets of the Year Award winners are announced.

The winner of the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 is Legion by David Harsent (Faber). Intimates by Helen Farish (Cape) won the best first collection prize, and 'Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second' by Paul Farley (The North) won the best single poem prize.

29 September 2005: Valeria Melchioretto, Rebecca O' Connor and Meryl Pugh are on the poetry shortlist for the inaugural New Writing Ventures award. The winner, who will receive £5000, will be announced on 28 October.

23 September 2005: A celebration of the 40th anniversary of the now legendary 1965 Poetry Internationale at the Royal Albert Hall will take place this Sunday 24 September, featuring Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Hegley, Grace Nichols, Adrian Mitchell and many more with MCs James Naughtie and Jude Kelly and music from Pete Townshend and Kathryn Williams. It is also a celebration of 25 years of Poetry Olympics and its co-ordinator, Michael Horowitz. More in the Independent and The Times.

25 August 2005: Nick Laird's first collection, To A Fault (Faber 2005), has been long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award.

15 August 2005: Colette Bryce will be the next North East Literary Fellow. She takes up the post on 1 October for two years. Bryce won the National Poetry Competition 2003 and her latest collection is The Full Indian Rope Trick (Picador, 2004).

21 July 2005: 'Poet as Traveller', the first issue of Poetry Review under Fiona Sampson's editorship, is published this week. Poetry Review is published quarterly under the auspices of the Poetry Society (founded 1909), though the Poetry Society values the Review's editorial independence since its inception in 1912. Fiona Sampson is its second woman editor; the first was Muriel Spark in 1947.  To subscribe, click here.

21 July 2005: Judy Brown won the 2005 Hamish Canham Poetry Prize.

19 July 2005: The shortlist for the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 is The Good Neighbour by John Burnside (Cape); Legion by David Harsent (Faber); A Shorter Life by Alan Jenkins (Chatto); Woods etc. by Alice Oswald (Faber); and Stolen Love Behaviour by John Stammers (Picador). The first collection shortlist is Intimates by Helen Farish (Cape); To a Fault by Nick Laird (Faber); Lucky Day by Richard Price (Carcanet); Scattering Eva by James Sheard (Cape); and Marabou by Jane Yeh (Carcanet). For the second year running, a poem from Poetry Review features on the single poem shortlist. This is Stephen Knight's '99 Poems', published in Poetry Review 95:1. The other contenders are 'Passages' by Sarah Maguire (Irish Pages); 'Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second' by Paul Farley (The North); 'Buffalo Calf' by Katherine Pierpoint (Poetry London); and 'Seventy Years a Showman' by Peter Scupham (The Rialto). The winners will be announced on 5 October 2005.

6 July 2005: Poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum has died at the age of 72. He edited A Group Anthology with Edward Lucie-Smith (1962) and published four collections of poetry as well a numerous works of criticism, most recently Essentials of Literary Criticism (1983) and Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form (1996).

3 June 2005: Charles Simic has won the International 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for his Selected Poems (Faber). The winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize was Roo Borson for Short Journey Upriver Toward Oish (McClelland and Stewart).

30 April 2005: Gwyneth Lewis has been chosen as the inaugural National Poet (Poet Laureate) for Wales. This is a bi-lingual role, and the appointment is for one year with an option to renew for a second. The post is administered by Academi and funded by the Arts Council of Wales.

21 April 2005: C K Williams has won the annual Ruth Lilly Poetry prize, awarded by the US magazine, Poetry, in which Williams's first published poem appeared. His latest collection is The Singing (Bloodaxe, 2003).

14 April 2005: Poet, playwright and novelist Julia Darling has died after a long battle with cancer. Her most recent collections were Apology for Absence and Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Arc).

5 April 2005: Alan Gillis has won The Rupert and Eithne Strong First Book Award for his collection, Somebody Somewhere (Gallery). This book was also shortlisted for the inaugural Irish Times PN05 Award, won by the late Dorothy Molloy for her collection Hare Soup (Faber).

5 April 2005: Dennis O'Driscoll has received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award is given to a writer from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales for a stay in the United States.

31 March 2005:The American poet Robert Creeley has died at the age of 78. He was a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and editor of Black Mountain Review. Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994 is published by Norton.

18 March 2005: Robin Bell, an award-winning poet, editor and broadcaster based in Perthshire, has received a £30,000 Creative Scotland Award to write about the G8 summit due to take place at Gleneagles this summer.

17 March 2005: Gillian Allnutt is the recipient of the 2005 Northern Rock Award, worth £60,000. The award will enable her to take a sabbatical from teaching in order to concentrate on her writing. Her most recent collection is Sojourner (Bloodaxe, 2004), and she published a pamphlet, Hob Green, with Phoenix Press in the same year. She lives in County Durham.

8 March 2005: Two poetry collections feature on the longlist for this year's Academi Book of the Year Award. These are Deryn Rees Jones's Quiver (Seren) and Mike Jenkins's The Language of Flight (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch).

18 January 2005: George Szirtes has won the T S Eliot Prize 2004 for his collection, Reel, published by Bloodaxe.

14 January 2005: Glyn Maxwell has been awarded the 2004 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his book, The Nerve (Picador, 2002).