A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
“who should still be thinking of their art in terms of play and exploration” (Gray 2015, 11). Instead, many of them are focused from the start on the prize culture and cultivate “the kind of work that is well received,” which may lead to what Gray calls “the problem of homogeneity” (Gray 2015, 12).
John Burnside, who received both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize in 2012 and was a member of the Man Booker Prize jury in 2015, is, though aware of the problems, inclined, understandably, to emphasize the importance of literary prizes:
There is the Martin Scorsese case, the most disturbing thing, when someone goes through years of missing prizes, not being entirely forgotten, for some reason, and that's sad when that happens because prizes do matter, they make a difference. They make a difference to sales, make a difference to publicity. And nobody in their right mind would say, “Oh, I only write for myself. I don't care if 12 people read my book or 12,000.” You'd much rather 12,000 people, because you're trying to communicate something as well. You may take great pleasure in the process of making these things as well, but you do want to show it to people and say, do you feel that way about it? So they do matter a lot. And, of course, you can't get into a situation like you have with children, “Everyone gets a prize.” It's difficult. The only time it bothers me is when I'm quite convinced that the prize was awarded for non‐literary reasons.
(Burnside 2016, 16)
Perhaps everyone's having to get a prize is the reason for the confusion of their numbers. If we start out by consulting Wikipedia, the page for “List of poetry awards” offers 21 entries for the United Kingdom (“List of Poetry Awards: United Kingdom” 2019) with only two for Ireland. (“List of Poetry Awards: Ireland” 2019) However, the Wikipedia page for “British poetry awards,” (“British Poetry Awards” 2019) which obviously leaves out the Irish Republic, lists 31 poetry prizes for Britain alone. Writers' handbooks usually list more than 200 literary prizes for Great Britain and Ireland, the majority of them being awarded for new novels, with just around 10% awarded in the field of poetry. When I scanned the “Prizes” section of The Writer's Handbook 2010 (Turner 2009) for poetry prizes and awards and, in addition, consulted the relevant index entry, the figure I arrived at was 35 for Great Britain and Ireland. The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2019 has 40 entries for poetry in its “Prizes and Awards” subject index, including listings for Arts Council England and its Irish equivalent An Chomhairle Ealaíon. The two national organizations deserve their listings in the index, because they offer financial support for awards or administer them. Through the Grants for the Arts Libraries fund (which became Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants from March 2018 onward), Arts Council England supported the Society of Authors Translation Prizes in March 2018 with £6,767 and the Somerset Young Poets Competition 2018 with £7,500 (Arts Council England, 2018). Their Irish counterpart announced in December 2018 a new award in memory of Anthony Cronin. Applications were invited from mid‐career writers in the English or Irish language who work in any form. The primary purpose of the new award is “to enable the writer to undertake travel or a residency abroad” in order to conduct research for a new work. Its ultimate aim, however, is to help writers “build the international dimension” of their career. The total maximum amount that may be awarded is €13,000, which is made up of €10,000 for living and writing and €3,000 for travel expenses (The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon 2019, 2–3).
In the chapter “Platforms and Performances” of his book The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010, Eric Falci places the proliferation of poetry prizes in the 1990s, in particular in the context of “newly established writing programs and workshops.” The consequence of this development was that “more poets took up teaching positions at colleges and universities,” which led to the institutionalization of poetry “as a craft and product” (emphasis added) in higher education (Falci 2015, 181). At the time several programs, including Poems on the Underground (1986), National Poetry Day (1994), and Poetry on the Buses (1998), were launched. These gave contemporary poetry a public presence and increased its profile considerably. The two Nobel Prizes for Derek Walcott in 1992 and Seamus Heaney in 1995
cemented trends indicative of postwar British poetry more broadly, […] saying nearly as much about the advance of Caribbean and Northern Irish poetry and the reorientation of British poetry in the previous several decades as they did about the achievements of each poet individually.
(Falci 2015, 181)
The most notable or noticeable instances of the so‐called proliferation of poetry prizes in the early 1990s are two major awards: the Forward Prizes (established in 1991) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (inaugurated in 1993), which started to offer significant cash rewards and, for a while, televised award ceremonies.
The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 1992 seems to confirm Falci's thesis: it lists 21 British and Irish prizes and awards for which collections of poetry could be submitted. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that even if poetry was not categorically excluded in the statements of eligibility, the great majority of literary prizes was never or hardly ever awarded to poets. An award illustrative of this propensity and also one of the most prominent on the 1992 list is The Mail on Sunday–John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, inaugurated as early as 1942 by Jane Oliver in memory of her husband John Llewellyn Rhys, a young writer killed on 5 August 1940 while serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force. It became part of the proliferation phenomenon when in 1987 The Mail on Sunday became its sponsor and the prize money was substantially increased: the winner received £5,000 and the runners‐up £500 each. This went on until 2003 when the BookTrust, in its own definition “the largest reading charity in the UK,” became its administrator, after which, in 2011, the UK's second oldest literary award was suspended. Awarded annually for the best work of literature as opposed to a particular form or genre—the eligibility was very liberal and extended to fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama—it was in fact only very rarely awarded to a poet. An examination of the list of winners demonstrates that the “liberal” approach is, generally speaking, to the detriment of poetry. In fact, The Mail on Sunday–John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was only once in its history awarded to a poet, that is, in 1984 to Andrew Motion for his collection Dangerous Play: Poems, 1974–1984 (Salamander Press/Penguin). This distinction, I would like to argue, may in part be owing to Motion's very prominent standing as a poet‐cum‐academic‐cum‐critic. He had held, and was still holding, influential positions in the literary business, from 1976 to 1980, teaching English at the University of Hull, and editing Poetry Review from 1980 to 1982, the magazine of the Poetry Society. Finally, from 1982 to 1989, he was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. Don't get me wrong: if, within the context of the literary awards system, I also pay some attention to the background of prize‐winning poets, I am not “simply railing against the whole machinery of literary awards, the mainstream publishing establishment, and its tight reviewing network” (Falci 2015, 208). I merely think it important to take this “machinery” apart, look at the pieces and develop an understanding of how it all works, because “[f]ocusing on the prize‐winning volumes from the past ten or fifteen years does not produce a capacious enough picture of twenty‐first‐century British poetry” (Falci 2015, 208).
Among the awards listed in the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 1992, more favorable to poetry are the Whitbread Literary Awards, whose administration actually introduced the poetry category in 1985 to remedy a deficit; until then the four prize categories had been First Novel, Novel, Children's Book, and Biography. Most satisfyingly, the winner of the inaugural award was Douglas Dunn with his famous collection Elegies (Faber & Faber), a moving account of his wife's death. Subsequent winners up to 1992 were Peter Reading, Seamus Heaney, Peter Porter, Michael Donaghy, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley, and Tony Harrison, at the time and, even more so in retrospect, a prestigious and high‐quality list of British and Irish poets. The winner of each category received £2,000 and the overall winner for the Whitbread Book of the Year obtained £20,500 on top of the Nomination Award. When in 2006, Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship of the awards, the total prize fund was increased to £60,000. Since then each of the category winners receives £5,000 and the overall