Robin Robertson – Year of election 2009

Robin Robertson has made a clean sweep of the Forward Prizes, winning Best First Collection, Best Single Poem and Best Collection, and has also won the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  His translations of the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer were extremely well-received, as was his version of Euripides’ Medea. His fourth poetry collection, The Wrecking Light, was published in February, and described by the Guardian as “a work of extraordinary visionary power, its music bleak and beautiful, spare and unsparing.” “If there were justice in the world,” this critic added, “it would win every prize going.”