Don Paterson

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Don Paterson

at 2013 Bridlington Poetry Festival
at 2013 Bridlington Poetry Festival
Born1963
Dundee, Scotland
NationalityScottish
Notable awardsEric Gregory Award;
Forward Poetry Prize

Donald Paterson OBE FRSE FRSL (born 1963) is a Scottish poet, writer and musician.

Background[]

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1963.[1] He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and his poem A Private Bottling won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1993.[2] He was included on the list of 20 poets chosen for the Poetry Society's 'New Generation Poets' promotion in 1994.[2] In 2002 he was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award.[1]

His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. God's Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The Eyes, adaptations of the work of Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939), was published in 1999. He is also editor of 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (1999) and of Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century (1999) with Jo Shapcott. His collection of poems, Landing Light (2003), won both the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award.[3] He has also published three collections of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows (2004), The Blind Eye (2007) and Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008). Orpheus, his version of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus, was published in 2006.[1]

Don Paterson teaches in the school of English at the University of St Andrews and is poetry editor for the London publishers Picador.[3] An accomplished jazz guitarist, he works solo and for ten years ran the jazz-folk ensemble, Lammas, with Tim Garland.[4][5]

In 2012, Paterson wrote an open letter in The Herald criticising Scotland's arts funding council Creative Scotland.[6]

In 2012-13, he was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford.[7]

Honours and awards[]

He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours.[8] He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in the 2010 New Year Honours.[9] In 2015 Paterson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[10]

Bibliography[]

Poetry[]

Collections
  • Nil nil. London: Faber & Faber. 1993.[11]
  • God's gift to women. London: Faber & Faber. 1997.
  • after Machado, Faber & Faber, 1999, ISBN 9780571200559
  • Graywolf Press, 2001, ISBN 9781555973537
  • Landing Light (2003)
  • (2006), after Rilke
  • Rain. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2009. ISBN 978-1-4668-8068-9. Winner of Forward Poetry Prize
  • Selected Poems, Faber & Faber, 2012, ISBN 9780571281787
  • 40 Sonnets, Faber & Faber, 2015, ISBN 978-0571310890 (shortlisted for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • Contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West. Gingko Library, 2019. ISBN 9781909942288
  • Zonal, Faber & Faber, 2020, ISBN 978-0571338245
Anthologies
  • 101 Sonnets (1999)
  • Last Words (1999) with (Jo Shapcott)
  • Robert Burns, poems selected by Don Paterson (2001)
  • with Charles Simic, Grayworf Press, 2004, ISBN 9781555973940
List of poems
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected
Wave 2014 Paterson, Don (3 March 2014). "Wave". The New Yorker. 90 (2): 65.

Plays[]

Radio drama[]

Aphorisms[]

  • The Book of Shadows Picador, 2004, ISBN 9780330431842
  • The Blind Eye (2007)
  • Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008)

Criticism[]

Critical studies and reviews of Paterson's work[]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c Foundation, Poetry (29 July 2020). "Don Paterson". Poetryfoundation.org. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b "Don Paterson | Poet". Scottishpeotrylibrary.org.uk. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b "Picador". Panmacmillan.com. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  4. ^ "Don Paterson". Poetry Archive. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  5. ^ "Acclaimed poet reveals he is writing play about Jimmy Savile". HeraldScotland.com. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  6. ^ "A post-Creative Scotland". HeraldScotland.com. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  7. ^ [1][dead link]
  8. ^ "No. 58729". The London Gazette (Supplement). 14 June 2008. p. 12.
  9. ^ [2][dead link]
  10. ^ "Professor Don Paterson OBE FRSE". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Retrieved 12 February 2018.
  11. ^ Winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection.

External links[]

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