Introduction to the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award

Edwin Morgan in the late sixties, at his Bluebird typewriter. Photographer unknown, courtesy of the Edwin Morgan Estate.

How does a poet’s work stay alive after his death? Having even one or two poems survive in key anthologies, Edwin Morgan recognized, is a triumph of sorts. But another way to be remembered is to try to ensure that new poetry is facilitated and brought into publication by means of earnings accumulated by your own writings. Morgan was a remarkably productive and successful writer—not only a poet but a dramatist, critic, librettist, professor, editor, and cultural journalist too—besides inheriting funds from his unbookish but business-oriented parents. They had hoped that he might have entered a safer and more rewarding career, such as working in a bank. But he did not, instead amassing through savings and investments almost a million pounds at his death, and leaving instructions that this was to be used to support young Scottish poets through a competition for new poetry. He left an equal amount to the Scottish National Party to support their political efforts to establish an independent Scotland.

Such an aspiration to support future generations of Scottish poets and the best of their writing clearly needed some sort of administration and oversight. Shortly after his death, the Edwin Morgan Trust was established by his literary and legal executors as a charitable organization, with designated educational and cultural aims for the promotion and practice of poetry and translation in Scotland. To be eligible for the award, poets need to be no more than thirty years of age, and to be a resident of Scotland, or of Scottish descent. Thus being a “Scottish” poet is not narrowly defined. They must also present a new collection of about thirty poems, at least pamphlet size, and do so anonymously, to be judged by two senior Scottish poets.

The young poets represented here are the first three winners of the biennial Edwin Morgan Poetry Award: Niall Campbell (2014), Penny Boxall (2016), and Roseanne Watt (2018). The cash prize of £20,000 is sufficient to support a year or so of writing. Runners-up and other shortlisted poets are also given cash prizes. As important, perhaps, are the recognition and publication opportunities that come with the award process, centered around a performance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. This means that the three poets here are in a position in 2020 that matches Edwin Morgan’s in 1970, with a good collection already completed and with the challenge of another to be created out of these troubling times.