Members' Areaas soon as dawn appears 4:17 dressed only in her clouds and murk hangs down over hills as if guilty two rooks quite high above steel blue still a star and something similar to laughter moves up from below making ducks distracted two sounds you can hear at this […]
Ted Hughes Award 2014
One Tourniquet
It was a long time ago but I was there, a combat medical technician. I saw children and IEDs which wasn’t nice at all. One boy: he had shorts and a dirty vest, he stood on a mine; he was conscious at first, screaming, and I thought what a mess. […]
A Birthmother’s Catechism
How did you let him go? With black ink and legalese How did you let him go? It’d be another year before I could vote How did you let him go? With altruism, tears, and self-loathing How did you let him go? A nurse brought pills for drying […]
Carrie Etter
Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and taught creative writing at Bath Spa University since 2004. She has published three collections of poetry: The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011) and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014); additionally, she edited the anthology […]
A century later
The school-bell is a call to battle, every step to class, a step into the firing-line. Here is the target, fine skin at the temple, cheek still rounded from being fifteen. Surrendered, surrounded, she takes the bullet in the head and walks on. The missile cuts a pathway in her mind, to an […]
Imtiaz Dharker
Born in Pakistan, Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. She is an accomplished artist and documentary filmmaker, and has published five collections of poems and drawings with Bloodaxe: Postcards from god (including Purdah) (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), […]
from Telling Tales Prologue (Grime Mix)
see my jaw dropping neat Anglo-Saxon, I got ink in my veins more than Caxton and it flows hand to mouth, here’s a mouthfeast, verbal feats from the streets of the South-East but my April, she blooms every shire’s end, fit or vint, rich or skint, she inspires them from the grime to the clean-cut […]
Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald was the inaugural winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2009 for her collection Weeds and Wildflowers. She lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her book-length poem Dart won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection, Woods etc., won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial […]
Andrew Motion
Professor Andrew Motion was born in London on 26 October 1952, and read English at University College, Oxford. An acclaimed poet (and champion of poetry), critic, biographer and lecturer, Andrew Motion became Poet Laureate in 1999, succeeding Ted Hughes and preceding Carol Ann Duffy. He was awarded the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for his poem […]
2014
Winner Judges Grayson Perry, Julia Copus and Kei Miller presented the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry to Andrew Motion for Coming Home, a poetic reimagining and radio performance of shared conversations centred on the effect of conflict, praised by the judges for its “innovative and deeply moving” poetry. “Coming Home is our deserving winner. We loved the way in […]