We are delighted to announce that Roseanne Watt is one of the winners of the Eric Gregory Awards, 2020 for her debut collection Moder Dy /Mother Wave (Polygon 2019) AND a Somerset Maugham Award, 2020. Both awards are made by the Society of Authors. As appropriate for the continuing Covid-19 situation, the award announcement can be seen online.

Read more now on the Society of Authors website and watch the online ceremony too.

• The Eric Gregory Awards, for collections by a poet under the age of 30, were founded in 1960 by the late Dr Eric Gregory for the encouragement of young poets.
• The Somerset Maugham Awards were set up by W. Somerset Maugham in 1947, to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries. The awards are made for a published work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry and the prize money must be used for foreign travel.

Moder Dy was also shortlisted for the Saltire Book of the Year Award, 2019 and was a collective winner of the Highland Book Prize, 2019. Roseanne won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2018 and the Outspoken Poetry Prize in 2015.

Her work in Moder Dy has been described as ranging ‘across the complex, often unfathomable dimensions of human experience, returning ceaselessly to her native home on the island archipelago, and the language which shapes its place in the world’. Written in English with a smattering of her native Shetlandic, Moder Dy is a collection where you are never too far from the sea.

Edward Crossan, Poetry Editor for Polygon commented,

I am extremely pleased with the news that Roseanne Watt has had such great success in both the Somerset Maugham and the Eric Gregory awards for her collection Moder Dy. Both of these awards carry tremendous prestige, with many of the awards’ previous winners having gone on to successful writing careers. This is very well deserved from such an accomplished debut poet; I can’t wait to publish more of her work.

A media view?

‘Extraordinarily intricate and multi-layered. An exercise in linguistic navigation. Unputdownable’ – Yorkshire Post