Awards
Costa Book of the Year
Poet Christopher Reid won the 2009 Costa Book of the Year award for his collection, A Scattering, a tribute to his wife Lucinda Gane following her death in 2005.
A Scattering consists of four poetic sequences, the first written during her final illness, and the other three at intervals after her death.
Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong in 1949. He studied at Oxford before becoming a journalist and book reviewer. He was Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber from 1991 to 1999, and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull from 2007 to 2009. He also runs his own independent publishing house, Ondt and Gracehoper, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Reid's poetry collections include Arcadia (1979), which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden prize, Katerina Brac (1985) and All Sorts, his first book of poems for children, which won the Signal Poetry Award in 2000.
What the judges said:
"Out of a personal tragedy, Christopher Reid has written a masterwork which has universal power. Austere, beautiful and moving - we all felt this was a book we would want everyone to read. Packed full of unforgettable lines - A Scattering is a remarkable piece."
A Scattering, published by Arete Books, is the sixth collection of poetry to take the overall prize. Seamus Heaney was the last poet to win the Book of the Year with a collection of poetry, taking the prize in 1999 for Beowulf.