A book by University of Chichester lecturer Dave Swann was chosen from hundreds of publications to be shortlisted for the 2011 Ted Hughes Award, a national competition organised by the current Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.
Dave’s book ‘The Privilege of Rain’ (Waterloo Press, 2010), a collection based on his experiences as Writer in Residence at HMP Nottingham Prison, was among five books chosen for the shortlist for the prize, which celebrates ground-breaking attempts to fuse poetry with other art-forms.
With its mixture of poems and stories, and its inclusion of haunting wood-cuts by the artist Clare Dunne, Dave’s book caught the eye of the judging panel.
In an awards ceremony at the Savile Club in London, the chair of judges, Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, awarded the £5,000 first prize to Kaite O’Reilly for ‘The Persians’, her re-telling of Aeschylus’s ancient play of the same name.
Afterwards Dave, who is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing, spoke of his excitement at being shortlisted for the award, which was made possible when Carol Ann Duffy donated her annual stipend in honour of one of her predecessors as Poet Laureate.
“It was incredibly generous of the Poet Laureate to give up her wage to set up the prize,” said Dave. “As a result, there is now a valuable space for brave and experimental small publishers to capture the attention of a wider public.
“It’s a real honour for any writer to be mentioned for a few seconds in the same breath as the legendary Ted Hughes. He was my hero when I was growing up, one of the first poets who showed me the magic of images and language. I feel incredibly happy to have my work recognised in this way.”
Dave described the awards ceremony as “quite a nerve-racking experience”. “It’s strange to walk into a room that contains so many talented writers, many of whom you’ve admired for years. At times, I had to pinch myself!
“When the award was announced, I was disappointed for a few minutes, but I got over it pretty quickly. It’s important to remind yourself that you write for the joy of writing, not for the end result. That’s what I tell my students, and it’s what I believe at the bottom of my heart.
“When I was teaching in prison, I discovered that reading and writing have the power to calm the mind. I saw this happen to some of the prisoners I taught, and it’s what I’ve found in my own life.
“Although writing can be very hard and lonely, it’s also an activity which allows you to go really deep into your life and the lives of others. That’s part of what I wrote about in my ‘The Privilege of Rain’. I wanted to try to show how writing can help to heal scars, and build empathy. That seems really important with all the current talk of cuts to arts funding, including literacy schemes in jails.
“To my mind, the arts make a more peaceful world. Money isn’t the bottom line – peace of mind is. Life without that is horrible. ‘The Privilege of Rain’ is an attempt to look at those issues, and to try to find stories that illustrate my belief that education has the potential to transform lives.
“Of course, it isn’t easy to change a life, and sometimes you’re bound to fail. Also, I’m not in the business of romanticising outlaws. Some of the poems in the book are about the victims of crime, including the wives and girlfriends of offenders. I wanted to show that their peace of mind is important, too. It seemed important to go beneath the skin of the issues.”
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