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Jaan Kaplinski
The Estonian writer and philosopher Jaan Kaplinski has been awarded the 2016 European Prize for Literature. Born in Tartu in 1941, Kaplinski studied linguistics at Tartu University and started his poetic life under the influence of Shelley and Lermontov, from which he recovered to write his distinctive verse, and to translate texts from various languages into Estonian. His works in English include the novel The Same River (Peter Owen), poetry translations with Harvill (London), Laurel Press (Canada), and a Selected Poems (2011) from Bloodaxe which has published his poetry for more than a dozen years.
T.S. Eliot Prize
Sarah Howe, who has contributed poems and an essay on Jorie Graham to PN Review, was awarded the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize in January. Sarah's Loop of Jade was the first ever début collection to win, from a shortlist that included Mark Doty, Tracey Herd, Selima Hill, Tim Liardet, Les Murray, Sean O'Brien, Don Paterson, Rebecca Perry and Claudia Rankine. Sarah held the Harper-Wood Studentship at St John's College, Cambridge in 2012. She was born in Hong Kong to a Chinese mother and an English father and moved to England when she was nine. She used the Harper-Wood to revisit her birthplace and consider her mixed heritage. The judges' decision was unexpected and generally welcomed. The chair of the judges, Pascale Petit, praised the book's 'startling exploration of gender and injustice through place and identity, its erudition, and powerful imagery as well as her daring experiment with form'. Sarah also won the 2015 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She is currently on a writing Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard.
Private Eye portrayed her victory as a plot. Oliver Thring interviewed the poet in the Sunday Times and rewarded her candour with slighting asides. 'It is entirely dismissive', the Guardian agrees. Thring is not the ideal interviewer for her, impatient with difficulty and with an opportunist's eye, not a reader's ear. The Twittering that followed his piece compelled him to Tweet, 'This gentle interview with a leading young poet has led various deranged poetesses to call me thick, sexist etc.' The ugly side-show to the happy outcome of the Eliot Prize reveals how certain attitudes - to education, gender and race -...