Michael Symmons Roberts wins top Forward prize
Michael Symmons Roberts has won the £10,000 Forward prize for his collection Drysalter, a spiritual sequence of metaphysical poems. Emily Berry’s Dear Boy took the prize for best first collection, while Nick MacKinnon’s ‘The Metric System’ took the best single poem award. Michael Symmons Roberts was praised by Jeanette Winterson, chair of the Forward judges, for the ambition of Drysalter. She said: "Whether or not you are of faith, most of us are interested in the idea of the soul: a life that has an inside and an outside."
Symmons Roberts was born in 1963 in Preston. His poetry has won the Whitbread award, and been shortlisted for the Griffin international poetry prize, and twice for the TS Eliot prize. A collaboration with composer James MacMillan has led to two BBC Proms choral commissions, song cycles, music theatre works and operas for the Royal Opera House, Scottish Opera, Boston Lyric Opera and Welsh National Opera. He has published two novels, and is professor of poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
He chose the title Drysalter for his fifth collection of poetry “in response to the old high traders called drysalters, who were dealers in gums, drugs, poisons and powders”. He said the word is also “a nod to the psalter, those mediaeval day-books that contained psalms, but also jokes and cartoons and marginalia”.
Winterson said that Emily Berry, who won the £5,000 prize for the best first collection, "has her ear to the ground of the beat of modern life, but also has a wider sense of the historical". The book would bring people to poetry, she said.
This year’s Forward prizes were enmeshed in controversy after one contender, CJ Allen, withdrew from the best single poem shortlist following allegations of plagiarism in earlier works. Winterson said she believed it had been a mistake for him to withdraw because the work was "a strong poem, whatever may have gone on in other places and at other times". She added: "I'm really sorry about it, because it would have been a strong contender. I would have liked to have heard him read that poem tonight."
The winner of the £1,000 prize – who read his poem at the award ceremony, at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room in London – was Nick MacKinnon, for 'The Metric System', about the idea of attempting to weigh something weightless. Winterson's fellow judges were poets Paul Farley and Sheenagh Pugh, actor Samuel West and journalist David Mills.
But the controversy that has dogged this year's awards, over plagiarism allegations, and actors reading poets' words, continued to the end. Tuesday's night's prize ceremony was criticised by the chief executive of the Arvon Foundation, Ruth Borthwick, who said in a blog headed "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back", that organisers had "got it badly wrong" in asking actors to read poems. She added: "The winning poets were rushed on and off the stage to collect their winnings, unable to even thank their publishers. They remained anonymous to the audience. At the end, the actors were thanked and the poets forgotten."
Background: Poet pulls out of Forward shortlist
PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN / WRITE OUT LOUD
