Emma Jones wins poetry award
19 October 2009
Australian poet Emma Jones was recently awarded the UK Forward Prize for poetry for her collection The Striped World, an accomplished and lyrical collection of verse inspired by William Blake’s poems about tigers and empty cages in a Paris zoo.
Emma received an Australia Council emerging writers’ grant in 2007 and a subsequent award from St John’s College, Cambridge. She is currently poet-in-residence at Dove Cottage, managed by the Wordsworth Trust in the Lake District of England. Emma bears the distinction of being only the second Australian poet (Geoffrey Lehmann was the first) to be published by Faber and Faber, the company co-founded by T S Eliot and home to poets of the stature of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
The Forward Prize is described as “the bardic Booker” and was created to bring poetry to a wider audience. The judges described Emma Jones as “an ambitious and intriguing new voice”. Martin Duwell, reviewing The Striped World for the Australian Poetry Review comments: The Striped World announces itself as great first books do: as a confident, almost authoritative, voice wrestling (if voices can wrestle) with a coherent and sophisticated set of concerns.”
Image: Emma Jones, photograph courtesy of Faber & Faber, London
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