Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry seeks to recognise excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life.


Judges Imtiaz Dharker, Tim Supple and Jo Shapcott shortlisted the following seven:

• Jackie Kay for Maw Broon Monologues (performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow). A full-length performance combining rhythmic verse, music and theatre.

• Dannie Abse for New Selected Poems 1949-2009: Anniversary Collection (published by Hutchinson 2009). A celebration of the 60th anniversary of Dannie Abse’s first collection After Every Green Thing.

• Paul Farley for Field Recordings: BBC Poems (1998-2008) (published by Donut Press 2009). This work brings together Farley’s broadcast poetry for the BBC over a ten-year period.

• John Glenday for Grain (published by Picador 2009). Fourteen years in the making Grain is at times delicately lyrical and at times playful or surreal.

• Alice Oswald for Weeds and Wild Flowers (published by Faber and Faber 2009). This is a magical meeting of the visionary poems of Alice Oswald and the darkly beautiful etchings of Jessica Greenman.

• Chris Agee for Next To Nothing (published by Salt Publishing 2009). Next to Nothing records the years following the death of a beloved child in 2001.

• Andrew Motion for The Cinder Path (published by Faber and Faber 2009). Motion’s collection offers a spectrum of lyrics, love poems and elegies all exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them.


With the permission of Carol Hughes, this innovative award is named in honour of Ted Hughes and recognises the many ways poets are working today, in printed forms and beyond.

Poetry collections for adults and children were considered alongside radio poems, film poems, public art inscriptions and works for the stage. The £5,000 prize money has been donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from the annual honorarium that the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen.

Any UK living poet, working in any form, who made the most exciting contribution to poetry between 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2009, was eligible for the award.

Duffy was delighted with the judge’s choices: “The Ted Hughes Award is named in honour of a great laureate and celebrates
new work in poetry, in any medium. I am thrilled at the diversity of the shortlist which the judges have announced today.”


The winner of the award will be announced on Tuesday 30 March 2010 at the Savile Club in London.