The Wilfred Owen Association presents a Poetry Award to honour a poet for a sustained body of work that includes memorable war poems.
The recipient of the 2010 Award is Professor Jon Stallworthy, FBA, FRSL, poet, biographer, and literary scholar.
Jon (Howie) Stallworthy is Professor Emertius of English at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and former Acting President of Wolfson College, Oxford. Born in 1935, he was educated at the Dragon School, Rugby School, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He also served in the Royal West African Frontier Force. He was poetry editor at Oxford University Press and John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University, New York.
His collections of poetry include The Astronomy of Love (1961), Out of Bounds (1963), Root and Branch (1969), Hand in Hand (1974), A Familiar Tree (1978), The Anzac Sonata (1986), The Guest from the Future (1995), Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems (1998) and Body Language (2004). His autobiography, The Singing School: The Making of a Poet, was published in 1998 and a collection of essays, Survivors' Songs, in 2008.
Jon Stallworthy's work has received numerous awards. His biography of Wilfred Owen (1974) was honored with the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His study of Yeats won the M. L. Rosenthal Award, while Louis MacNeice: A Biography (1995) won the Southern Arts Literature Prize.
He edited Owen’s Complete Poems and Fragments (1984) and Henry Reed’s Collected Poems, as well as numerous anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1996, with Margaret Ferguson and Mary Jo Salter), A Book of Love Poetry (1974), and The Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984). With Peter France, he co-translated Alexander Blok’s Selected Poems (1970, originally titled The Twelve and Other Poems) and Boris Pasternak’s Selected Poems (1983).
The presentation will take place at Wolfson College, Oxford, on Saturday November 13th 2010. Professor Stallworthy will be interviewed by Dr Jane Potter and will read some of his poetry (this event has now sold out).
Thanks to sponsorship from Coutts, the WOA has commission Royal College of Art student Chrystalla Achilleos to design the award itself.
