Poet triumphs in Pounds 30,000 Costa prize

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Arifa Akbar
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 27.01.2010
• Subjects: Reid, Christopher
• ISSN: 0951-9467

A Scattering was published last year and reached the 2009 short lists for the Forward Poetry Prize and the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry. Alister Babb, Waterstone's poetry buyer, said that by winning the Costa award: "[Christopher Reid] joins giants such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney as one of the few poets to take the prize, and in doing so, bring more people to this undervalued art form." Born in Hong Kong, Reid was educated at Oxford before becoming a journalist and book reviewer. He was poetry editor at Faber & Faber for nearly a decade, and professor of creative writing at the University of Hull from 2007 to 2009. The Scattering was written as a tribute to Lucinda Gane, a TV actress and Reid's partner of 28 years whom he movingly called "amazingly vivid and unstoppably lively". He said he had not discussed writing the collection with her while she was alive, but he imagined she knew that he would write about her death. "I had written plenty of poems for her, lots of love poems, while she was alive. We never discussed what I'd do after her death but I think she knew I would turn to putting it all in words, rhymes and rhythms," he said.