Nationality British | Awards E. M. Forster Award | |
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Born 19 December 1952 (age 64)
London ( 1952-12-19 ) Genres poet, critic, playwright Books The Drowned Book, The Beautiful Librarians, Cousin Coat, The deregulated muse, Once Again Assemble Similar Don Paterson, Peter Porter, W N Herbert, Simon Armitage, Jean Sprackland | ||
Sean O'Brien (born 19 December 1952 in London) is a British poet, critic and playwright. His prizes include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize (2001 and 2007) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only two poets (the other being John Burnside) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems (The Drowned Book). He grew up in Hull, and was educated at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. He has lived in Newcastle upon Tyne since 1990, where he teaches at the university. He is currently the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford.
Contents
Career
O Brien's book of essays on contemporary poetry, The Deregulated Muse (Bloodaxe), was published in 1998, as was his anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (Picador). Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976–2001 (Picador) was published in 2002. Sean O'Brien's new verse version of Dante's Inferno was published by Picador in October 2006. His six collections of poetry to date have all won awards. In 2007 he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T S Eliot Prize for The Drowned Book (Picador, 2007). This was the first time a poet had been awarded the Forward and the Eliot prizes in the same year. In 2006, he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and was previously Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. He is a Vice-President of the Poetry Society. He was co-founder of the literary magazine The Printer's Devil and contributes reviews to newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement and is a regular broadcaster on radio. His writing for television includes "Cousin Coat", a poem-film in Wordworks (Tyne Tees Television, 1991); "Cantona", a poem-film in On the Line (BBC2, 1994); Strong Language, a 45-minute poem-film (Channel 4, 1997) and The Poet Who Left the Page, a profile of Simon Armitage (BBC4, 2002). Other significant work includes a radio adaptation for BBC Radio 4 of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.