THE Australian poet Les Murray is the winner of the 1996 T.S. Eliot Prize (worth £5,000 sterling) for his collection Subhuman Redneck Poems (Carcanet), writes Katie Donovan.
Because he was ill, Murray was unable to attend the prize giving ceremony in the British Library on Monday night. Born in 1938, Murray grew up on a farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. where he still lives. His many collections of poetry include Collected Poems (1991) and Translations From The Natural World (1993). Australia's best known poet, he is widely considered (along with a handful of others including Nobel prizewinners Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott) to be one of the finest poets writing in the English language. An anarchic Catholic who is also deeply interested in Australian Aboriginal culture, his style is accessible and generous, and sometimes satirical.
This year's T.S. Eliot Prize was judged by the poets Andrew Motion, Helen Dunmore and Ruth Padel. Motion said of Murray's work: "He is a poet of exceptional range, energy and ambition." Irish poets Ciaran Carson (a former winner of the prize) and Seamus Heaney were on the shortlist of 10 poets. Heaney recently won the Whitbread Poetry Award for his collection, The Spirit Level (Faber). The English poet of Irish descent, Maura Dooley, was shortlisted for her second collection, Kissing A Bone (Bloodaxe). Newcomer 30 year old Alice Oswald, meanwhile, was shortlisted for her first collection The Thing In The Gap Stone Stile (OUP) (also shortlisted for the Whitbread). Oswald's poems, which have been compared with the early Ted Hughes, are influenced by years she spent as a professional gardener. She lives in Devon with her playwright husband, Peter Oswald, whose adaptation of an 18th century Japanese puppet play, Fair Ladies At A Game of Poem Cards, directed by the young Irish director, John Crowley, is currently running at the National Theatre in London.
The other poets shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award were Adrian Mitchell for Blue Coffee (Bloodaxe), John Fuller for Stones And Fires (Chatto), Stephen Knight for Dream City Cinema (Bloodaxe), Christopher Reid for Expanded Universes (Faber) and Susan Wicks for The Clever Daughter (Faber).
