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Roseanne Watt wins Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2018

Roseanne Watt has won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2018.  Watt is the third poet to win the award set up by the late Makar Edwin Morgan to support poets 30 years of age and under. With its award of £20,000, the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award is one of the largest literary prizes in the UK.

Roseanne Watt is a poet, filmmaker and musician from Shetland; her poems are shaped by the landscape and language of her birthplace. She is poetry editor for the online literary magazine The Island Review. She was the winner of the 2015 Outspoken Poetry Prize (Poetry in Film) and runner-up in the 2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. She lives and works in Edinburgh.

The Edwin Morgan Poetry Award is a competition for full-length, unpublished manuscripts. The judges were novelist Janice Galloway and poet John Glenday.

Her poems are built from the sight, sound and heartbeat of land as much as from the sea and salted-away memory, alongside which we find the most complex and mysterious of human experiences. This is a celebration of language, place and the mystery of being alive, alive, alive.
Janice Galloway, Judge
There’s a remarkably mature intelligence at work in these profound, assured and wilfully spare poems—Roseanne Watt’s is a truly individual and welcome voice.
John Glenday, Judge

The runner-up is Daisy Lafarge, who will receive a prize of £2,500. Lafarge is a writer and editor based in Edinburgh. In 2017 she received an Eric Gregory Award and her pamphlet, understudies for air, was published by Sad Press. She is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow and an editor at MAP, a platform for artist-led publishing and production.

The other short-listed poets, who each receive £1,000, are: Tom Docherty, Nadine Aisha Jassat and Peter Ratter. The Award is administered by the Scottish Poetry Library.