Ted Hughes Award: Carol Ann Duffy Establishes New Poetry Prize
Posted on July 13, 2009
The Guardian reports that Britain's Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has announced a new poetry prize celebrating poetry. Carol Ann Duffy's donation of her yearly £5,750 stipend as laureate to the Poetry Society set-up the prize. The prize will be called the The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and will be awarded annually.
Duffy had already made clear that she "didn't want to take on what basically is an honour on behalf of other poets and complicate it with money". "I thought it was better to give it back to poetry," she said in May, when she was chosen as laureate.You can read more about the new Ted Hughes Award here on the UK'S Poetry Society's website. It was very thoughtful of Carol Ann Duffy to donate her annual stipend for the new poetry prize. Her first poem as Britain's Poet Laureate was very serious. She took on the MP Expense Scandal.The prize, worth £5,000, will go to a UK poet working in any form - including poetry collections for adults and children, individual poems, radio poems, translations and verse dramas - who has made the "most exciting contribution" to poetry that year. "I'm delighted, with the assistance of Buckingham Palace and the Poetry Society, to be founding this new award for poetry. With the permission of Carol Hughes, the award is named in honour of Ted Hughes, poet laureate, and one of the greatest 20th-century poets for both children and adults," said Duffy in a statement announcing the new prize.