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In a way, it is unfortunate that we have to have a prize culture at all. But we do have to have it. Because we do, unfortunately, have to make a fuss to draw people's attention to the better work that's being produced.

(Burnside 2016, 17)

Prizes have become a normal part of any moderately successful literary career. When a poet makes a submission of new poems these days, it has, accordingly, become part of the procedure to give the covering letter or email the character of a bio/bibliographical note. In it, quite understandably, the poet points out that he or she has won a poetry prize, even if it is a prize too obscure to have been heard of. In fact, many poets, almost like accountants, keep lists of even every shortlisting in poetry competitions or awards. The entries in the “Notes on Contributors” sections of any poetry magazine are quite illuminating in this respect. In the “Some Contributors” section of PN Review 221 (2015), Kathleen Bell, a poet from the East Midlands, draws attention to the shortlisting of her chapbook at the memory exchange (Oystercatcher Press) for the 2014 Saboteur Awards. The Italian poet Pierluigi Cappello needs to inform readers of the magazine that “[a]mong his awards are a Montale Europa Prize (2004), the Bagutta Opera Prima Prize (2007), and the prestigious [sic!] Viareggio‐Rèpaci Prize (2010)” (87). The American poet Marilyn Hacker received the “PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2009, the PEN / Voelcker Award for her own work in 2010, and the Prix Argana from the Beit‐as‐Sh'ir / House of Poetry (Morocco) in 2011” (87). Mimi Khalvati, we are told, received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Maitreyabandhu, a poet from Henley‐in‐Arden, Warwickshire, who was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1990, “has won the Keats‐Shelley Prize, the Basil Bunting Award, and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize,” and his first collection is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. And, finally, the poet and critic Neil Powell published Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music, which was Biography of the Year at the 2013 East Anglian Book Awards. One is reminded of James F. English's book The Economy of Prestige subtitled Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, published in 2005. The opening chapter is called “Prize Frenzy” and takes for its epigraph the verdict of the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” The British literary world—its poetry scene in particular—seems to operate on the same principle.

As early as 1989, Margaret Drabble had reflected on the literary prize system and the steady increase in the number of prizes, arguing that “poets more than any other category of writer need prizes and bursaries to keep aloft” (Drabble 1989, 251). Kathryn Gray in 2015 admits that prizes can be regarded as “a welcome opportunity to financially reward the purveyors of an art form who typically went largely unremunerated for their efforts” (Gray 2015, 8), but reminds “the children of prize culture” (Gray 2015, 8), whom she defines, appropriately, as “those of us in the mainstream,” that “the pragmatism of consensus” among the judging panels “limits individual passions in favour of general acceptance” (Gray 2015, 9). Gray regards this phenomenon as “profoundly unhealthy” (Gray 2015, 11) for new poets, “who should still be thinking of their art in terms of play and exploration” (Gray 2015, 11). Instead, many of them are focused from the start on the prize culture and cultivate “the kind of work that is well received,” which may lead to what Gray calls “the problem of homogeneity” (Gray 2015, 12).

John Burnside, who received both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize in 2012 and was a member of the Man Booker Prize jury in 2015, is, though aware of the problems, inclined, understandably, to emphasize the importance of literary prizes:

There is the Martin Scorsese case, the most disturbing thing, when someone goes through years of missing prizes, not being entirely forgotten, for some reason, and that's sad when that happens because prizes do matter, they make a difference. They make a difference to sales, make a difference to publicity. And nobody in their right mind would say, “Oh, I only write for myself. I don't care if 12 people read my book or 12,000.” You'd much rather 12,000 people, because you're trying to communicate something as well. You may take great pleasure in the process of making these things as well, but you do want to show it to people and say, do you feel that way about it? So they do matter a lot. And, of course, you can't get into a situation like you have with children, “Everyone gets a prize.” It's difficult. The only time it bothers me is when I'm quite convinced that the prize was awarded for non‐literary reasons.

(Burnside 2016, 16)

Perhaps everyone's having to get a prize is the reason for the confusion of their numbers. If we start out by consulting Wikipedia, the page for “List of poetry awards” offers 21 entries for the United Kingdom (“List of Poetry Awards: United Kingdom” 2019) with only two for Ireland. (“List of Poetry Awards: Ireland” 2019) However, the Wikipedia page for “British poetry awards,” (“British Poetry Awards” 2019) which obviously leaves out the Irish Republic, lists 31 poetry prizes for Britain alone. Writers' handbooks usually list more than 200 literary prizes for Great Britain and Ireland, the majority of them being awarded for new novels, with just around 10% awarded in the field of poetry. When I scanned the “Prizes” section of The Writer's Handbook 2010 (Turner 2009) for poetry prizes and awards and, in addition, consulted the relevant index entry, the figure I arrived at was 35 for Great Britain and Ireland. The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2019 has 40 entries for poetry in its “Prizes and Awards” subject index, including listings for Arts Council England and its Irish equivalent An Chomhairle Ealaíon. The two national organizations deserve their listings in the index, because they offer financial support for awards or administer them. Through the Grants for the Arts Libraries fund (which became Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants from March 2018 onward), Arts Council England supported the Society of Authors Translation Prizes in March 2018 with £6,767 and the Somerset Young Poets Competition 2018 with £7,500 (Arts Council England, 2018). Their Irish counterpart announced in December 2018 a new award in memory of Anthony Cronin. Applications were invited from mid‐career writers in the English or Irish language who work in any form. The primary purpose of the new award is “to enable the writer to undertake travel or a residency abroad” in order to conduct research for a new work. Its ultimate aim, however, is to help writers “build the international dimension” of their career. The total maximum amount that may be awarded is €13,000, which is made up of €10,000 for living and writing and €3,000 for travel expenses (The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon 2019, 2–3).

In the chapter “Platforms and Performances” of his book The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010, Eric Falci places the proliferation of poetry prizes in the 1990s, in particular in the context of “newly established writing programs and workshops.” The consequence of this development was that “more poets took up teaching positions at colleges and universities,” which led to the institutionalization of poetry “as a craft and product” (emphasis added) in higher education (Falci 2015, 181). At the time several programs, including Poems on the Underground (1986), National Poetry Day (1994), and Poetry on the Buses (1998), were launched. These gave contemporary poetry a public presence and increased its profile considerably. The two Nobel Prizes for Derek Walcott in 1992 and Seamus Heaney in 1995

cemented trends indicative of postwar British poetry more broadly, […] saying nearly as much about the advance of Caribbean and Northern Irish poetry and the reorientation of British poetry in the previous several decades as they did about the achievements of each poet individually.

(Falci 2015, 181)

The most notable or noticeable instances of the so‐called proliferation of poetry prizes in the early 1990s are two major awards: the Forward Prizes (established in 1991) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (inaugurated in 1993), which started to offer significant cash rewards and, for a while, televised award ceremonies.

The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 1992 seems to confirm Falci's thesis: it lists 21 British and Irish prizes and awards for which collections of poetry could be submitted. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that even if poetry was not categorically excluded in the statements of eligibility, the great majority of literary prizes was never or hardly ever awarded to poets. An award illustrative of this propensity and also one of the most prominent on the 1992 list is The Mail on Sunday–John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, inaugurated as early as 1942 by Jane Oliver in memory of her husband John Llewellyn Rhys, a young writer killed on 5 August 1940 while serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force. It became part of the proliferation phenomenon when in 1987 The Mail on Sunday became its sponsor and the prize money was substantially increased: the winner received £5,000 and the runners‐up £500 each. This went on until 2003 when the BookTrust, in its own definition “the largest reading charity in the UK,” became its administrator, after which, in 2011, the UK's second oldest literary award was suspended. Awarded annually for the best work of literature as opposed to a particular form or genre—the eligibility was very liberal and extended to fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama—it was in fact only very rarely awarded to a poet. An examination of the list of winners demonstrates that the “liberal” approach is, generally speaking, to the detriment of poetry. In fact, The Mail on Sunday–John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was only once in its history awarded to a poet, that is, in 1984 to Andrew Motion for his collection Dangerous Play: Poems, 1974–1984 (Salamander Press/Penguin). This distinction, I would like to argue, may in part be owing to Motion's very prominent standing as a poet‐cum‐academic‐cum‐critic. He had held, and was still holding, influential positions in the literary business, from 1976 to 1980, teaching English at the University of Hull, and editing Poetry Review from 1980 to 1982, the magazine of the Poetry Society. Finally, from 1982 to 1989, he was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. Don't get me wrong: if, within the context of the literary awards system, I also pay some attention to the background of prize‐winning poets, I am not “simply railing against the whole machinery of literary awards, the mainstream publishing establishment, and its tight reviewing network” (Falci 2015, 208). I merely think it important to take this “machinery” apart, look at the pieces and develop an understanding of how it all works, because “[f]ocusing on the prize‐winning volumes from the past ten or fifteen years does not produce a capacious enough picture of twenty‐first‐century British poetry” (Falci 2015, 208).

Among the awards listed in the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 1992, more favorable to poetry are the Whitbread Literary Awards, whose administration actually introduced the poetry category in 1985 to remedy a deficit; until then the four prize categories had been First Novel, Novel, Children's Book, and Biography. Most satisfyingly, the winner of the inaugural award was Douglas Dunn with his famous collection Elegies (Faber & Faber), a moving account of his wife's death. Subsequent winners up to 1992 were Peter Reading, Seamus Heaney, Peter Porter, Michael Donaghy, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley, and Tony Harrison, at the time and, even more so in retrospect, a prestigious and high‐quality list of British and Irish poets. The winner of each category received £2,000 and the overall winner for the Whitbread Book of the Year obtained £20,500 on top of the Nomination Award. When in 2006, Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship of the awards, the total prize fund was increased to £60,000. Since then each of the category winners receives £5,000 and the overall winner a further £30,000. The terms of eligibility are defined as follows:

Books must be submitted directly by publishers, not by authors. Authors of submitted books must have been resident in the United Kingdom or Ireland for over six months of each of the previous three years (although UK or Irish nationality is not essential). Books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November of the previous year and 31 October of the current year. Books previously published elsewhere are not eligible.

The jury for each category consists of three judges: usually, an author, a bookseller, and a journalist, who select a shortlist of four collections from which they proceed to choose the winner. The Costa Book of the Year is selected by a panel of nine judges, which includes five authors, one from each of the five categories; the Costa Chairman; and “three other people in the public eye who love reading.” In an interview for Poetry Salzburg Review, Burnside, who was the author judge for the poetry category in 2013, points out some of the problems of the Costa Book Awards and critiques them:

I very passionately went in to try to get the poetry book to win, but the others … they liked the poetry book, but they felt that it wasn't as substantial a piece of literary work as a novel. I don't know why people think that [laughs]. That's the view. And also you have the arguments that come and say – we are talking to a wider public, we are trying to get people to read. If you're going to give them something which is going to mystify them … The poetry that I was fighting for was Michael Symmons Roberts's book Drysalter (2013), which I think with a bit of application anybody could read, with a bit of work. But there's that perception which is basically if you ask them to do much work, too much work, it will be off‐putting. They have to work their way towards that kind of book, which sometimes means that that kind of book doesn't get a prize. But he [i.e. Michael Symmons Roberts] has won prizes, the Forward Prize and the Whitbread Prize, and was on the shortlist of the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2013, and that's good.

(Burnside 2016, 15–16)

Along with Burnside the jury for the poetry category included Olivia Cole, a journalist and winner of the 2003 Eric Gregory Award, who had published a first collection of poetry, and Daniel Eltringham, whose PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, is on Wordsworth and Prynne, and who has published on R. F. Langley, Peter Riley, and Sean Bonney, and is also the coeditor of the excellent online poetry journal The Literateur. Considering Cole's and Eltringham's expertise in poetry, it is not surprising that Burnside reached a unanimous decision with them in favor of Michael Symmons Roberts's collection. In addition to the prejudice, vexing to Burnside, that a collection of poetry “wasn't as substantial a piece of literary work as a novel” there is the problem presented by the jury's brief itself, which, Burnside points out, requires them “to select well‐written, enjoyable books that they would strongly recommend anyone to read” (Costa Book Awards 2019). This practically rules out the choice of a volume of adventurous and innovative verse. Both these aspects are reflected in the composition of the jury for the Costa Book of the Year. It was chaired by Rose Tremain, the author of 14 novels and five collections of short stories, who taught Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and was its chancellor. The “three other people in the public eye who love reading” were: Natascha McElhone, British stage, screen, and television actress; Richard Osman, a BBC and Channel 4 presenter, producer, and director; and Sharleen Spiteri, songwriter and lead singer of the Glasgow‐based rock band Texas. The authors from the juries of the other four categories were Matt Cain (First Novel), Gerard Woodward (Novel), Anne de Courcy (Biography), and Emma Kennedy (Children's Book). When one studies the personal websites of the jury members and other sources relating to them, it is, admittedly, almost always difficult to assess whether or not there is a potential interest, let alone expertise, in regard to poetry. However, in order to avoid mere speculation, let us continue considering the personal literary background of each figure from the jury. It can be assumed that Sharleen Spiteri as a songwriter may have a certain perhaps debatable predilection for poetry. Woodward, who is both a poet and a novelist—he has published six collections of poetry, six novels, and two collections of short stories—won an Eric Gregory Award for poets under 30 (1989), and for his first collection of poetry, Householder, the Somerset Maugham Award (1991). As all the other jury members have a personal background in prose and fiction, one can certainly understand Burnside's difficulties, and eventual failure, in persuading his fellow adjudicators to vote for the poetry book.

In the abovementioned interview, Burnside mentions awards that he seems to hold in higher regard than the Costa: the Forward Prizes and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Forward Prizes were set up in 1992 by William Sieghart, an entrepreneur and publisher, who also founded National Poetry Day in 1994—a day of celebration of verse on the first Thursday in October—and, 1 year later, the Forward Arts Foundation, a charity that administers both poetry projects. Its mission is threefold: “to deepen appreciation of poetry's value; to celebrate excellence in poetry; to increase poetry's audience” (Forward Arts Foundation 2019). For Sieghart, “[p]oetry is a magnificent companion in this busy modern world, often giving us a vocabulary for emotions we cannot express” (Treneman 1997). The Forward Prizes are awarded in three categories: Best Collection, Best First Collection, and Best Single Poem. For the twenty‐fifth anniversary in 2016, the value of the Forward Prize for Best Collection was increased to £15,000, while each of the shortlisted poets was awarded £1,000. The winner of the Best First Collection received £5,000 and the poet of the Best Single Poem could cash a check worth £1,000. Since 2013, the Forward Prizes have been presented live on stage, a special event at the Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre in late October, after readings from the shortlisted collections. In contrast to the Costa Book Awards, the judging panel includes only poets and poetry editors. The 2016 panel was chaired by Malika Booker, writer and spoken word artist, and included the poets George Szirtes and Liz Berry, the singer/songwriter Tracey Thorn, as well as Don Share, editor of Poetry Magazine. The shortlist of each category consisted of five nominations. The really surprising aspect of the three shortlists was the omission of publications from some established publishers, for example, Faber & Faber and Chatto & Windus (an imprint of Random House). A close consideration of the poets on the three shortlists left me not just surprised but positively—in both senses of the word—puzzled: there was a striking absence, perhaps with the exception of Alice Oswald, of the so‐called “big names.” I could only agree with Malika Booker, chair of the judges, when she asserted, admittedly going a little over the top (which, no doubt, appealed to the press):

In this 25th year of the Forward prizes, I feel we're seeing a complete resurgence and a breaking down of barriers within and around poetry. Just look at the shortlist: there are eleven women and the multiplicity of voices is testimony to the fact that the poetry published here now feels totally global. These collections and works represent the very best of contemporary poetry. Fresh, vibrant and full of new insights and challenging ideas, each demands attention and we're all daunted by the prospect of choosing our winners.

(Bainbridge 2016)

The shortlist of Best Collection was headed by Trinidad‐born Vahni Capildeo (Carcanet Press), who was to receive the prize, and Choman Hardi (Bloodaxe Books)—born in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, she lived in Iraq and Iran before seeking asylum in the UK in 1993. Their poems deal with migration, protest, and polylingualism, some of today's big issues. Alice Oswald (Cape Poetry) and Denise Riley (Picador Poetry) are poets who could not be more different in terms of their publishing careers. Oswald published her first collection, The Thing in the Gap‐Stone Stile, with Oxford University Press in 1996. She received immediate and prestigious recognition, winning the Best First Collection category of the Forward Prizes. In November 1998, Oxford University Press infamously announced the closing down of its poetry list, which meant the loss of their chief avenue of publication to some 50 poets, including D. J. Enright, Sean O'Brien, Craig Raine, and Peter Porter (Glaister 1999). This is the reason why Oswald published her second collection, Dart, with Faber & Faber, for which she received the T. S. Eliot Prize. Oswald stayed with the London publisher until 2011, when she entrusted to them her sixth collection, Memorial—which was shortlisted, again, for the T. S. Eliot Prize. However, Oswald withdrew her collection from the shortlist in December 2011, because she took issue with the fact that the Poetry Book Society, the administrator of the prize, had signed a 3‐year sponsorship deal with Aurum, an investment company managing hedge funds (Flood 2011; Waters 2011). One could suppose that the step caused some friction with her publisher; which could not have been abated when she gave her next collection, Falling Awake (2016), to Cape Poetry, an imprint of Penguin Random House's Vintage Books. In contrast to Oswald, Denise Riley stepped into the poetry pool at the other end and with less of a splash. She published with a small imprint. Her Selected Poems was brought out by Ken Edwards's Reality Street in 2000. Her shortlisted collection, Say Something Back, was her first collection with Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan owned by the privately held Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group that is based in Stuttgart. With Ian Duhig's The Blind Roadmaker, Picador had a second collection on the shortlist.

The second award that Burnside mentions is the T. S. Eliot Prize, which was inaugurated in 1993, celebrating the Poetry Book Society's fortieth anniversary and in honor of its founder. It is “awarded annually to the author of the best new collection of poetry published in the UK and Ireland.” (TSEliot.com 2019). In 2016, following the closing down of the Poetry Book Society, the T. S. Eliot Foundation, which was set up in 2012 following the death of Valerie Eliot to promote the poet's work and legacy, took over the running of the prize. The Foundation increased the value of the prize: the winner receives £20,000 and each of the shortlisted poets £1,500. A shortlist of 10 books was announced in October and the Shortlist Readings took place on January 15, 2017, in the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall. The winner, Jacob Polley for his collection Jackself (Picador), was announced at an award ceremony the next day (January 16, 2017), where Polley and the shortlisted poets were presented with their checks (Poetry Book Society n.d.). A close study and analysis of the winners from 2006 until 2018 gives the impression of monotony and predictability; it could be argued that a desirable momentum of surprise has been missing as regards the publishers of the winning poets. In the past decade, Faber & Faber published the winning poet four times: Heaney in 2006, Walcott in 2010, Olds in 2012, and Hannah Sullivan in 2018. Cape came up trumps on three occasions: Burnside in 2011, Olds in 2012, Ocean Vuong in 2017; Bloodaxe twice with Hadfield in 2008 and Gross in 2009, while Picador (O'Brien in 2007) and Carcanet (Morrissey in 2013) could celebrate only one poet each from their list. In this context, Eric Falci rightly observes that “one aspect of the ecosystem of contemporary British poetry is the enduring importance of a very small number of London‐based imprints whose slim volumes dominate the prize circuit and reviews pages” (Falci 2015, 209). For David Wheatley, “prizes occupy the threshold between the trading floor of reviews, group membership and public visibility, and the unknown territory of the literary afterlife. Reputation is not double‐entry book‐keeping, and no amount of entries in the first column can guarantee a healthy surplus in the second.” He calls prizes “racing tips, punts on posterity,” which are “heavily prone to error” (Wheatley 2015, 163). Already in 2002, Michael Schmidt had warned that “[p]oetry prizes are now the vehicle of literary reception. Control the prizes, and you control the culture of reception” (Schmidt 2002, 1). He arrived at this conclusion after reading Bookworm in Private Eye (26 July–8 August 2002) who analyzed the Forward Prize and its judges:

This year's judges include two poets published by Picador (Sean O'Brien and Michael Donaghy), who have shortlisted two other Picador poets (Peter Porter and Paul Farley) for the £10,000 top prize. Last year's judging panel also included two Picador poets – Donaghy (again) and Peter Porter.

Last year Porter gave the main prize to Sean O'Brien. What's the betting O'Brien won't give it back to his mentor, enabling both to pocket ten grand? Or will their protégé Paul Farley be the one to take the loot this time round?

Last year the £5,000 prize for “best first collection” went to another Picador poet, John Stammers (a product of Donaghy's poetry workshops), and the £1,000 “best single poem” prize was given to Ian Duhig for a poem – you guessed it – from his forthcoming Picador collection. The same poem earlier won Duhig the £5,000 top prize in the Poetry Society's national poetry competition, judged by a three‐man panel including his mate Don Paterson, the foul‐mouthed Scottish bard who also happens to be the poetry editor at, er, Picador.

This year's five‐poet Forward shortlist includes two other chums, David Harsent and John Fuller (winner of the Forward prize in 1996, when one of the judges was again Sean O'Brien). And Sean O'Brazen was one of three judges of the 1997 T. S. Eliot prize (worth £5,000), which was awarded to … his own editor, Don Paterson.

Duhig, Donaghy, O'Brien, Harsent and Paterson all have the same agent, TriplePA, aka Gerry Wardle – who just happens to be Sean O'Brien's partner. And Donaghy, Duhig, Farley, Fuller, Harsent, Paterson and Porter have all received fulsome write‐ups from the Sunday Times's main poetry critic, one Sean O'Brien.

(Bookworm 2002, 25; also cf. Stone 2016)

In a 2014 blog post, Fiona Moore analyzed the shortlists, from 2004 to 2013, of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, counted the publishers of the shortlisted books, and compared them with the judges' and the Poetry Book Society selectors' publishers. All the winning collections were published by one of the “Big Five”: Bloodaxe, Cape, Carcanet, Faber, and Picador. When she added to the “Big Five” other big publishers (e.g., Seren, Chatto, Gallery Press), only 2% of the shortlisted books came from small publishers. The Forward Prize percentage at 14 was slightly better. Ninety‐three percent of the Eliot Prize judges and three out of every four Forward judges were published by one of the “Big Five.” Even currently speaking, in 2018 and 2019, the situation has not changed a bit: two Bloodaxe titles and one each from Faber, Cape, and Carcanet are on the 2019 Forward Best Collection shortlist. The three judges who are also poets are Tara Bergin (Carcanet), Andrew McMillan (Cape), and Carol Rumens (Seren/Blooadaxe). The 2018 T. S. Eliot shortlist comprised four books from Faber, two from Penguin, and one each from Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Picador, and, finally, from the small press HappenStance. The jury was chaired by Sinéad Morrissey (Carcanet), the other two jurors were Daljit Nagra (Faber) and Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe).

The prize system is not simply to be characterized as big handouts serving the interests of “big” publishers though. One of the most prestigious awards has, in fact, little to offer in the way of prize money. The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, at its initiation in 1963 was worth just £1,000, then increased to the not exactly princely sum of £1,500 in 2014. It has, however, a list of winners who make up a who's who of contemporary poetry: among them are Seamus Heaney (1968), Geoffrey Hill (1970), Douglas Dunn (1976), Paul Muldoon (1982, 1992), John Burnside (1994), and Alice Oswald (2006). This impressive line of tradition was maintained when its administration celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the award in 2014, with the judges Julia Copus, Ruth Padel, and Max Porter giving the prize to two joint‐winner collections: Bright Travellers (Jonathan Cape) by Fiona Benson and Black Country (Chatto & Windus) by Liz Berry. The terms of eligibility of the prize, it must be added, preserve it from narrowness; it varies the category of its recipients by alternately recognizing a volume of poetry or of fiction by a citizen of the UK, Ireland, or the Commonwealth under the age of 40, that last condition saving it from being permanently committed to established authors. A final important aspect: the judges are not inevitably and a priori Faber authors, but are nominated afresh every year by the editors of newspapers and magazines.

The guidelines defining the rules and conditions of entry usually contain the stereotype requirement “first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland.” The T. S. Eliot Foundation administering the T. S. Eliot Prize, famously described by Andrew Motion as “the prize most poets want to win,” concedes simultaneous publication in another country within 1 year. The Forward Arts Foundation defines the eligibility of entries for their three poetry categories in almost identical terms. The Costa Book Awards differ from the previously mentioned awards only in that the author must have been resident in the UK or Ireland for at least 6 months per year in the preceding 3 years. Even the Michael Marks Awards for poetry pamphlets, established in 2009, confine entry to UK publications. By recognizing the enormous contribution that small presses and little magazines make to the poetry world, this award is very welcome. Previous winners—among them the Crater Press, Oystercatcher Press, HappenStance, smith|doorstop, Flarestack Poets, Rack Press, Mariscat Press, The Emma Press, and Guillemot Press—have more than deserved the award. However, the parochial policy of the institutions administering these awards is reminiscent of mercantilism, perhaps all the more understandable in the wake of Brexit, but unthinkable for the German‐language poetry scene.

The majority of the Irish poetry awards contrast pleasantly with their British counterparts at least with regard to the lack of complication in the situation. The Patrick Kavanagh Award, one of the most prestigious poetry prizes in Ireland, is simply confined to poets born in Ireland, or of Irish nationality, or long‐term residents of Ireland. It is awarded for a first unpublished collection and the winner receives €1000. The sole adjudicator is Brian Lynch, poet, novelist, and president of the society (the Patrick Kavanagh Society n.d.). Similarly, the Poetry Now Award is presented for the best single volume of poetry by an Irish poet.² Two prestigious poetry prizes are awarded annually at the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival and are administered by Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council—the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Shine/Strong Poetry Award. The latter is presented annually to the author of the best first collection of poems published by an Irish poet in the previous year. As Poetry Salzburg had published Jim Maguire's first collection Music Field in June 2013, the administrators were contacted so as to establish whether the poet's eligibility was somehow nullified by the possible ineligibility of his European publisher. It had not been specified in their Publishers Guidelines whether or not a publisher had to be operative in the Republic. The reply received the very next day confirmed that the sole condition was that the author had to be an Irish citizen or resident in Ireland for the past 5 years and that there was no need for the publisher to be operative in the Republic. Jim Maguire's collection was shortlisted and he was invited, together with four other shortlisted poets, to give a reading in the new Central Library and Cultural Centre in Dún Laoghaire. Although he did not win the award, it was, in his own words, “a thrill” for him to participate in such a prize reading.

Summing up, one might remark that the administrators of UK poetry prizes should devise and implement a code of practice. Joey Connelly quite rightly asks: “Why not require declarations of interest, both of the judges involved in the shortlisting process, and of those selecting the panels of judges? Why not lay bare the process by which these judges are chosen, and the shortlists assembled?” (Connelly 2014, 126). Moore suggests “a wider range of judges, such as magazine editors, small‐press‐published poets, reviewers (the latter are often poets too)” (Moore 2014). In a reply to Moore's post, Norbert Hirschhorn suggests as a possible code of conduct the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Contest Code of Ethics. For a more global outlook, one could recommend that the Irish stipulations for eligibility might be studied and also implemented.