SEAN O'BRIEN
Poet
POETRY LATE BITE: July 25
Sean O'Brien is a British poet, critic and playwright. His prizes include the Eric Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Cholmondeley Award, thrice the Forward Poetry Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is one of only three poets (the others being Ted Hughes and John Burnside) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems (The Drowned Book). He grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived in Newcastle upon Tyne since 1990, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford.