Ted Hughes Award

The Ted Hughes Award is an annual prize given to a living UK poet for new work in poetry. It is awarded each spring in recognition of a work from the previous year.

The award was established in 2009 with the permission of Carol Hughes in honour of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Annually the members of the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society recommend a living UK poet who has completed the newest and most innovative work that year, "highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life." The award seeks to celebrate new work that may fall beyond the conventional realms of poetry, embracing mediums such as music, dance and theatre. The £5,000 prize funded from the annual honorarium that Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy receives as Laureate from The Queen.

Alice Oswald was the inaugural winner of the 2009 award for her collection Weeds and Wildflowers (etchings by Jessica Greenman). The 2010 award, selected by judges Gillian Clarke, Stephen Raw and Jeanette Winterson, was awarded to Kaite O’Reilly for her site specific retelling of Aeschylus’ play, The Persians (first produced in 472 BCE). Three other poets were short-listed. Christopher Reid worked with director Niall MacCormick to adapt his narrative poem The Song of Lunch into a 50-minute BBC2 film. David Swann's The Privilege of Rain (published by Waterloo Press, with wood-cuts by Clare Dunne), is a collection compiled following a year as Writer in Residence at HMP Nottingham (prison). Katharine Towers' The Floating Man is a debut collection published by Picador.

The 2011 award went to Lavinia Greenlaw won the prize for sound piece Audio Obscura. Shortlisted were Julia Copus for Ghost Lines, Robert Crawford for Simonides, Andrew Motion for Laurels and Donkeys and Christopher Reid for Airs and Ditties of No Man’s Land.

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