Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald (née Keen; born 31 August 1966) is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Biography

Oswald is the daughter of Charles William Lyle Keen and Lady Priscilla Mary Rose Curzon, daughter of Edward Curzon, 6th Earl Howe. Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford. She then trained as a gardener and worked at such sites as Chelsea Physic Garden, Wisley and Clovelly Court Gardens. As of 2016, she was living near Totnes, Devon with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children. Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty and the aunt of Keen's daughter Dafne.

Works

In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), was shortlisted for a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, as well as the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997. Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a " … moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference … ". Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). In 2009 she published both A sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial. Subtitled "An Excavation of the Iliad", Memorial is based on the Iliad attributed to Homer but departs from the narrative form of the Iliad to focus on, and so commemorate, the individual named characters whose deaths are mentioned in that poem. Later in October 2011, Memorial was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, but in December 2011, Oswald withdrew the book from the short list, citing concerns about the ethics of the prize's sponsors. In 2013, Memorial won the Poetry Society’s Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for poetry in translation. Oswald was a judge for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. In 2017, she won the Griffin Poetry Prize for her seventh collection of poems, Falling Awake.

Poetry

Awards and recognition