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Irlam-born poet wins Scot award

Lucy McGuire
1/ 5/2008

A SALFORD-born writer has been picked from thousands of entrants around the world as the winner of Scotland‘s prestigious national poetry prize.

Jane Weir, 43, who lived in Irlam until her 20s, won Scotland’s £2,500 Wigtown Poetry Prize which she will be awarded with this weekend.

The Anglo-Italian writer, who now lives in Matlock, Derbyshire, will receive the prize on Saturday, May 2, at Bladnoch Distillery, Wigtown, in Scotland.

The awards event, supported by the Scottish National Poetry Library, will be hosted by competition judge, Robert Crawford, who commended the winning poem, ‘On the Recommendation of Ovid We Tried a Weasel’.

The poem, inspired by a visit to an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, called ‘At Home in Renaissance Italy’, deals with the issue of infertility and a renaissance coping strategy which ultimately fails.

Jane, who has an MA with distinction in creative writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, now lives with her husband Sean, 52, and their two children, Jonathan, 18, and James, 15.

The writer, who says she has ‘many family connections’ in Salford, makes regular trips to see her mum, Winifred, in Irlam.

And despite already being joint winner of the first Jackson Dawson Award for poetry in 2003, and being shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award in 2006, Jane says she is really pleased with her success.

She said: "My work is quite modern and placed in the world today but has classical references to the Italian renaissance.

"You never expect to win something like this, especially when judging poetry is so subjective."

Jane, whose work has been widely published in anthologies and a number of magazines will launch her latest book in October this year.

Walking the Block is a poetic biography, based on the creative lives of Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher; two important modernist textile artists and hand block printers who made a range of hand blocked naturally dyed textiles between the two world wars.

She said: "A lot of people feel quite isolated in the world of poetry but anybody should be able to pick it up.

"Sometimes you can say more in a poem than you can in a novel."