Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid (2007)

Christopher Reid FRSL (born May 13, 1949 in Hong Kong ) is a British journalist and poet , who was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1980 for his first volume of poetry Arcadia , and later prizes such as the Cholmondeley Award and the Costa Book Award received.

Life

After attending school in England studied Reid 1968-1971 at the University of Oxford and was then as a freelance journalist and literary critic for the magazine Craft operates. In 1978 he received the Eric Gregory Prize for Poetry for his first poems .

In 1979, Arcadia was his first volume of poetry, which in 1980 won both the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award . In the following years several other volumes of poetry appeared such as Pea Soup (1982), Katerina Brac (1985), In The Echoey Tunnel (1991) and, after receiving the Cholmondeley Award in 1995, Expanded Universes (1996). In 1998 he published an anthology for the first time for the publishing house Faber and Faber , namely Sounds Good: 101 Poems to be Heard (1998), which in 1999 received the Signal Poetry Award 2000 for children's poetry collection All Sorts and in 2000 with Not to Speak of the Dog: 101 Short Stories in Verse was followed by another anthology published for Faber and Faber.

In 2001, in addition to the book of children's poetry Alphabicycle Order , a collection of his poems was published in the USA for the first time under the title Mermaids Explained . Then appeared with For and After (2002) and Mr Mouth (2005) two further collections of his poems. With The Selected Letters of Ted Hughes he published another book for Faber and Faber in 2007. In 2009 he published two further volumes of poetry, The Song of Lunch (2009) and A Scattering (2009), with A Scattering, dedicated to his late wife Lucinda Reid, not only winning the 2009 Costa Book Award for Book of the Year, but also was nominated for the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the best poetry collection of the year.

Reid, who is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature , is seen alongside Craig Raine as a co-founder of the so-called "Martian School" of poetry, which uses exotic and humorous metaphors to alienate everyday experiences and objects. He has also published illustrations for Punch and London magazines and runs his own publishing house: Ondt & Gracehoper. He is also a visiting lecturer at the University of Hull and a jury member on the Miss Alice Warrender Foundation for Hawthornden Prize committee .

more publishments

• The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1989-1990 , publisher, 1989
• Universes , 1994
• Two Dogs on a Pub Roof , Illustrated by Bryan Illsley, 1996
• The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Poetry 1997 , 1997

Web links

• Literature by and about Christopher Reid in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography and Bibliography (contemporarywriters.com)
• THE TELEGRAPH: Christopher Reid: a poet who was inspired by grief (Interview, January 10, 2010)
• THE GUARDIAN: Poet Christopher Reid talks about winning the Costa book of the year (Interview, January 29, 2010)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John McCullough wins the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature Penned in the Margins, accessed July 26, 2020.