A POET who was discarded by Oxford University Press last year has won Britain's biggest poetry award, the £10,000 Forward Prize, presented last night on the eve of National Poetry Day. Jo Shapcott's third collection My Life Asleep, beat Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, Jane Draycott's Prince Rupert's Drop, Kate Clanchy's Samarkand and Paul Muldoon's Hay.
The judges - who included Erica Wagner, the literary editor of The Times, and the novelist Helen Dunmore - read more than 100 collections, as well as 100 single poems. The chairman of the judges, Simon Armitage, the Millennium Dome's official poet, said: "The judges all felt that she is writing her best work at the moment - witty, sensual and erotic." Last year's winner was Ted Hughes, then Poet Laureate, for Birthday Letters.
Ms Shapcott, born in London in 1953, is the author of two previous poetry collections, Electroplating the Baby and Phrase Book. She was among poets who suffered when Oxford University Press decided to stop publishing poetry, prompting an outcry from the literary world. She is now published by Faber & Faber. She has held fellowships at Cambridge and Harvard and is the only person to have won the National Poetry Competition twice. There was also a £5,000 prize for the best first collection, which went to Nick Drake for The Man In The White Suit. The £1,000 best single poem prize was won by Robert Minhinnick's Twenty Five Laments for Iraq.
One of the themes of National Poetry Day is whether "pop lyrics are the new poetry". The nation's favourite song lyric will be decided in a BBC poll. Asked whether her win was poetic justice in the light of OUP's treatment, she said: "That's history." She did, however, say that it was justice for her former poetry editor at OUP, Jacqueline Simms, because she had taken on the book. William Sieghart, founder of the prize, said that she had been one of poetry's best-kept secrets: "I hope this is the beginning of a more public career for her."
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