NAMED for Scotland’s first modern official Makar, the nation’s premier poetry award, given by the Edwin Morgan Trust, will go to one of seven poets named on the shortlist yesterday.
Colin Bramwell, Michael Grieve, David Linklater, Paul Malgrati, Alycia Pirmohamed, Kirsten Reid and Stewart Sanderson will contest the biennial £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.
Morgan, who died at the age of 90 in 2010, specified that the award was to be funded through his estate and should be given to a Scottish poet under the age of thirty.
The Scottish Poetry Library said: “Never forgetting his difficulties in his early years as a poet, he wanted to lend a helping hand to promising poets at what can be a discouraging period in their career.”
The 2020 judges are poets Kathleen Jamie and John Glenday, who have read through sixty-plus unpublished collections of poetry, submitted to them anonymously, and after much debate they drew up the shortlist of seven.
Jamie and Glenday said: “Not only is it Morgan’s centenary year (we would have loved to read the poem he would have written for that, as he did for his eightieth!) but it is also a year of unprecedented global challenge.
“So, it is doubly relevant that we remember Morgan’s bequest was designed to encourage young talent to blossom. The difficulties of today mean we will need the poets of tomorrow as never before.”
The winner will be announced at a special online event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
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