Biography

Sean O’Brien (b. 1952) is a central figure in the contemporary poetry world – he has won major prizes for each of his five poetry collections, including the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham award, the E.M. Forster Award and, twice, the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He is also the editor of The Firebox, an acclaimed anthology of post-war UK poetry, a professor of Creative Writing in Sheffield, and the author of literary criticism and journalism for several newspapers and journals.

His poetry often combines demotic and more literary language and is strongly aware of its northern location – a poem such as ‘Cousin Coat’ creates an angry presence of historical injustice, closed mines and cenotaphs, by enhancing the rhythms and rhymes of ordinary speech. This means that when a more extravagant word is used, it feels necessary – the “comfy meliorists / Grown weepy over Jarrow photographs” seem less believable than the speaker who finds nothing to ameliorate the memories.

There is much more than gloom in the poetry. ‘The Amateur God’, for instance, set as the year first turns warm, revels in “detail / And leisure to name it” as it conjures up a garden, and ‘Reading Stevens in the Bath’, which O’Brien describes in his introduction as “a deranged song of praise to Wallace Stevens”, zooms from a wide view of Newcastle to where “a large pink man / Is reading Stevens in the bath”, through allusions to Stevens, snatches of ‘Paper Moon’, and “howay!”, a chant taken straight from a night out in Newcastle. He also shows a deft way with comic poetry, such as the puncturing of poetry-reading mores in ‘Welcome Major Poet’ or the speech of the scriptwriter in ‘The Thing’, drawn – hopefully indirectly – from O’Brien’s theatre experience.

His formal manner is assured; a poem called ‘Ballad of the Lit and Phil’ is indeed in ballad form and his reading indicates a clear pleasure in the metrical shape of his lines. These factors combine to show that O’Brien can add performance to the skills that led Poetry Review to describe him as “the poet-editor-critic of his generation”.

 

Sean's recording was made on 28 February 2005 at The Audio Workshop, London and was produced by Richard Carrington.

Poems by Sean O’Brien

Essay on Snow - Sean O’Brien
Postcards to the Rain God (an extract) - Sean O’Brien
Reading Stevens in the Bath - Sean O’Brien
Cousin Coat - Sean O’Brien
Sean O’Brien in the Poetry Store

The free tracks you can enjoy in the Poetry Archive are a selection of a poet’s work. Our catalogue store includes many more recordings which you can download to your device.

Books by Sean O’Brien

Awards

1979

Eric Gregory Award

Prize website
1984

Somerset Maugham Award – The Indoor Park

Prize website
1988

Cholmondeley Award

Prize website
1992

Northern Arts Literary Fellowship

1993

E. M. Forster Award

Prize website
1995

Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) – Ghost Train

Prize website
2001

Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) – Downriver

Prize website
2001

Northern Writer of the Year Award

2001

T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) – Downriver

Prize website
2006

Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem for Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright)

Prize website
2007

Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award

2007

Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection) – The Drowned Book

Prize website
2007

T. S. Eliot Prize – The Drowned Book

Prize website
2007

Royal Society of Literature fellowship

Prize website
2012

Griffin Poetry Prize International shortlist – November

Prize website

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