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AS the youngest winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, at 30, Jen Hadfield is also a relative newcomer. The £15,000 cheque that she collected recently has previously been awarded to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes — though never to Andrew Motion, the chair of this year’s judges.
Announcing her win, Motion described Hadfield’s poetry collection, Nigh-No-Place, as "a revelation; jaunty, energetic, iconoclastic — even devil-may-care". Born in Cheshire, with an English father and a Canadian mother, Hadfield studied English at Edinburgh University, where she worked with the novelist and poet Robert Allan Jamieson. In 2002 she received a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary, and in 2003 she won an Eric Gregory Award which she used to fund a year in Canada. Four years ago she moved
to Shetland, a place and dialect which informs much of her poetry. A
stint in a fish-packing factory to makes ends meet resulted in a poem
about haddock and their "gut worms".
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