Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2011 * Poem from Ciaran Berry's The Sphere of Birds * For the Birds

Abstract

On National Poetry Day 2010, the English Association announced the inauguration of a new biennial prize for a distinctive first collection of poems in English published in Britain or Ireland. On National Poetry Day 2011, the £500 first prize was awarded for the first time, going to Ciaran Berry for his book The Sphere of Birds (Gallery Press). Berry was born and grew up in Ireland but now lives in Connecticut, teaching at Trinity College in Hartford. The Michael Murphy Memorial Prize was set up and funded by members of the English department at Nottingham Trent University, in memory of our colleague Michael Murphy, who died in May 2009 at the age of forty-three. Michael's first poetry collection, After Attila, appeared from Shoestring Press in 1998 when he was thirty-three. Shoestring published two subsequent collections, Elsewhere (2003) and Allotments (2008), and has now released his posthumous Collected Poems (2011). Michael's critical works included Poetry in Exile: A Study of the Poetry of W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky and George Szirtes (2004) and Proust and America (2007). The prize-giving event, at which there were readings from all six shortlisted books, was hosted by the Bookmarks bookshop in Bloomsbury and compèred by Stan Smith; and it included a moving tribute to Michael by his friend and publisher, John Lucas.