Welcome to UK Poetry - February 2008
We are delighted to be able to start the year on four legs, to paraphrase the sphinx, with one of the UK’s brightest young stars as our guest editor. Helen Mort began winning prizes for her poetry before she was a teenager and was a top winner of the Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award no less than five times between the ages of 11 and 17.
She topped this accolade in 2007 with an Eric Gregory Award, the UK’s primary poetry award for poets under the age of 30. Her first pamphlet soon followed: the shape of every box, was published the same year by tall-lighthouse.
We also have four poets on offer to start the year: Kathryn Daszkiewicz; Clare Pollard and Andrew Greig, both of whom are also recipients of an Eric Gregory Award; and Michael Laskey.
Rather than talk about them now, Helen has written an excellent editorial, ‘Sparks’ which I will let speak for itself. You can read it in full here.
Links
Foyle Young Poets
The 2008 competition for 11-17 year olds is free to enter and launches in March. Some of Helen’s past winning poems feature on the site.
The Eric Gregory Awards
The Society of Authors’ award for poets under thirty in the UK.
the tall-lighthouse
Helen’s publisher. They also have a pamphlet series, pilot, dedicted to poets under thirty.
