Prize Winners

Shortlists

Longlists

Judges

• Chair of Judges

  

  Liz Lochhead

  An acclaimed poet, playwright and broadcaster, Liz Lochhead is regarded as one of Britain’s finest living writers. ‘Liz Lochhead has made a unique contribution to Scottish poetry,’ Carol Ann Duffy has written. ‘From the start, she spoke in her own feisty, female voice, mixing old Scots with new Scots – as aware of Burns as of Morgan – and she did this with a galvanizing spirit and vitality that helped to change the landscape of British poetry’.

  Between 2011 and 2016, Liz was the Makar, Scotland’s National Poet Laureate. It was her second such honour: in 2005, she was made Glasgow’s Poet Laureate. In 2015, Liz was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

  Born in Motherwell in 1947, she served her literary apprenticeship in Philip Hobsbaum’s writers’ group alongside James Kelman, Alasdair Grey, Jeff Torrington and Tom Leonard. The poems Lochhead wrote during this time would be collected in 1972’s Memo for Spring. Later collections include True Confessions and New Clichés (Polygon, 1985), Bagpipe Muzak (Penguin, 1991), The Colour of Black & White (Polygon, 2003) and A Choosing (Polygon, 2011). Her selected poems, A Choosing, were published in 2011.

  Her plays include: Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989); Dracula (1989); Cuba (1997), a play for young people commissioned by the Royal National Theatre; and Perfect Days (1998). She has also translated Molière’s Tartuffe (1985) and adapted The Misanthrope as Misery Guts (2002).

  Liz’s engagement with the Romantic period runs through her work. ‘I grew up being taught Burns and the border ballads – but then John Keats grew up on those ballads as well,’ she told the Guardian. As well as memorising Robert Burns’ ballads as a child, Liz also learned John Keats’ Old Meg She was a Gypsy by heart. She entitled her 1984 collection, Dreaming Frankenstein, which echoed the subject of her first play, Blood and Ice – a dramatic recasting of how Mary Shelley’s life intersected with her most famous work. You can hear Liz read a selection of Robert Burns at the BBC here.

• Poetry Judges

  

  Mathew Sweeney

  The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association was deeply saddened by the death of Matthew Sweeney, the acclaimed Irish poet and since 1999 a Poetry Judge for the Keats-Shelley Prize. Read our own appreciation: here.

  Matthew was born in County Donegal. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books among others. His collections include: A Dream of Maps (1981), Blue Shoes (1989), Cacti (1992), The Bridal Suite (1997), A Smell of Fish (2000), Selected Poems (2002), Black Moon (2007), The Night Post: A New Selection (2010), and Inquisition Lane (Bloodaxe Books 2015). He is the winner of many poetry awards including the Cholmondley Award, the Arts Council Award and in 2014 the Piggott Poetry Prize. He has worked as Poet in Residence at the University of East Anglia and the South Bank and elsewhere.

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  Professor Jo Shapcott

  Professor Jo Shapcott, FRSL joined us as Poet Judge in 2017. She has won numerous awards including the National Poetry Competition (twice), the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (2011). She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

  Her books include Poems 1988-1998 (2000, reprinted 2006) consisting of poetry from her three earlier collections: Electroplating the Baby (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Phrase Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). Together with Matthew Sweeney, she edited Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (1996), an international anthology of contemporary poetry in English. Her book Tender Taxes, “her version of Rilke” was published in 2002. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award.

• Essay Judges

  

  Professor Sharon Ruston

  Professor Sharon Ruston is a long-standing Judge of the Prize essays. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, having previously taught at Bangor, Keele and Salford.

  Her research specialism concerns the relations between the literature, science and medicine of the Romantic period, 1780-1820. Her first book, Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), explored the medical and scientific contexts which inform Shelley’s concept of vitality in his major poetry. Since then, she has worked on Mary Wollstonecraft’s interest in natural history, William Godwin’s interest in mesmerism, and Humphry Davy’s writings on the sublime. These form chapters of her most recent book, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

  In 2020, Sharon published (with Tim Fulford) the four volume Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy and his Circle with Oxford University Press. Read a Q&A with Sharon and Professor Fulford at the BARS Blog.

  Visit Sharon’s profile page at the University of Lancaster here.

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  Professor Simon Bainbridge

  Professor Simon Bainbridge is a long-standing Judge of the Prize essays. He teaches and writes at the University of Lancaster.

  His main research interest is in the relationship between the writing of the Romantic period and its historical context. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford University Press, 2003) and the editor of Romanticism: A Sourcebook. He has published in journals such as Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net and The Byron Journal and has written essays and entries for An Oxford Companion to The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, The Blackwell Companion to European Romanticism, and The Oxford Handbook to English Literature and Theology. Among other current projects he is working on the literature and culture of mountaineering in the Romantic period.

  Visit Simon’s profile page at the University of Lancaster here.