Mick Imlah takes Forward prize after 20-year silence
Two decades in the making, The Lost Leader takes £10,000 award after unanimous acclaim from judges
Alison Flood writing in guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday October 08 2008

Twenty years after his first poetry collection Birthmarks was published to critical acclaim, Mick Imlah has won the £10,000 Forward prize for best collection with his second, The Lost Leader.

Imlah, who promised to "take care to be quicker" with his next collection, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the end of last year and pronounced himself "thrilled" at his win. "It's a great boost for morale in my present circumstances," he added, saying that he planned to spend his £10,000 winnings on his two daughters, Iona (five) and Mary (two).

Last night's Forward awards ceremony also saw 35-year-old Kathryn Simmons take the £5,000 best first collection prize for Sunday at the Skin Launderette. The £1,000 best individual poem prize went to Don Paterson's poem about his unrequited love for an obscure Eastern European singer, beating Seamus Heaney's Cutaways.

Paterson's "Love Poem For Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze", in which he writes of his love for the real-life singer "with her unruly Slavid eyebrows ranged like/ two duelling pistols", was described by chair of judges Frieda Hughes as "fabulously wrought lines of devotion from a benevolent stalker who should be given free concert tickets for life".

Fellow judge and poet Fleur Adcock said: "It was quite tricky to judge because we had Seamus Heaney there - a great monument glowering at you. Seamus always writes brilliantly but Don Paterson's poem was just so original, so startling; it's not the sort of thing some of us would have thought of reading. Not everyone's into looking up obscure singers on the internet. [But] it's one of those poems of such ingenuity, so entertaining - he keeps you waiting for the rhymes in the style of Ogden Nash." Heaney, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995, has yet to win anything in the Forward prize's 17-year history.

Read the rest at the Guardian online.