The entries will be judged this year by Christopher Reid, Don Paterson and Peter McDonald.

Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong in 1949, educated in England, and studied at Oxford University from 1968-1971. He then worked as a freelance journalist and as book review editor of Crafts magazine. He won an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry in 1978. A year later his first poetry collection, Arcadia (1979) was published, winning the 1980 Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. This has been followed by Pea Soup (1982); Katerina Brac (1985); In The Echoey Tunnel (1991); Expanded Universes (1996); For and After (2002) and Mr Mouth (2005). A selection of his poems was published in the US as Mermaids Explained (2001). He is often cited as co-founder with Craig Raine of the 'Martian School' of poetry which employs exotic and humorous metaphors to defamiliarize everyday experiences and objects. He has also written two books of poetry for children: All Sorts (1999) and Alphabicycle Order (2001). He is the editor of two Faber and Faber collections: Sounds Good: 101 Poems to be Heard (1998) and Not to Speak of the Dog: 101 Short Stories in Verse (2000). Christopher Reid has also published illustrations in Punch and London Magazine, worked as Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber for eight years, and runs his own independent publishing house, Ondt & Gracehoper. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 1995, the 2000 Signal Poetry Award for his children's collection All Sorts, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2007-09 he was Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. In 2007, he edited The Selected Letters of Ted Hughes for Faber and Faber. His latest collections are The Song of Lunch (2009), and A Scattering (2009), in memory of his late wife, Lucinda. A Scattering was shortlisted for the 2009 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize, and won the 2009 Costa Book of the Year.

Don Paterson

Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee, Scotland. He moved to London in 1984 to work as a jazz musician, and began writing poetry around the same time. His collections of poetry are Nil Nil (Faber, 1993), God’s Gift to Women (Faber, 1997), The Eyes (after Antonio Machado, Faber, 1999), Landing Light (Faber, 2003; Graywolf, 2004), Orpheus (a version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus, Faber, 2006) and Rain (Faber, 2009; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). He has published two books of aphorism, The Book of Shadows (Picador, 2004) and The Blind Eye (Faber, 2007), and a compendium, Best Thought, Worst Thought (Graywolf, 2008). He has also edited a number of anthologies. His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize on two occasions. Most recently, Rain won the 2009 Forward prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association; he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010. He teaches poetry at the University of St Andrews and since 1996 has been poetry editor at Picador Macmillan. He continues to perform and compose.

Peter McDonald

Biography, books and literary criticism.