Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald (* 1966 in Reading , Berkshire ) is an English poet .

life and work

Alice Oswald studied Classical Philology at New College, Oxford . After completing her studies, she worked as a gardener for a few years. She is married to the English playwright Peter Oswald and lives with him and their children in Totnes .

Her first collection of poems, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Styles , appeared in 1996 and was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for best debut. For her second volume Dart (2002), which tells the story of the river of the same name from different perspectives, she received the TS Eliot Prize in 2002 . This was followed by Woods (2005), won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize . The Weeds and Wildflowers collection won the Ted Hughes Award in 2009.

Oswald won the renowned Hawthornden Prize in 2010 for her work A Sleepwalk on the Severn . Her 2011 book Memorial is based on Homer's Iliad . The focus here is on the fates of the common soldiers and not those of the gods and heroes. She herself describes it as the " excavation of the Ilias ". In 2013 she was the first female poet to receive the Warwick Prize for Writing for the innovative form and imagery of this work . For Falling Awake , she received the Costa Book Award in 2016 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017 .

Alice Oswald was Samuel Fischer visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin in the 2015/2016 winter semester.

Works (selection)

• 46 minutes in the life of twilight . Translation: Iain Galbraith, Melanie Walz. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2018

Web links

• Literature by and about Alice Oswald in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/09/alice-oswald-homer-iliad-interview
2. ↑ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/alice-oswald
3. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/21/tseliotprizeforpoetry.awardsandprizes
4. ↑ http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/alice-oswald
5. ↑ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/prizeforwriting/archive/2013/