London Poetry Award nomination Alice Oswald: 'She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a “miniature Iliad ”, taut, fluid and graceful.'

The Telegraph on Memorial: “Oswald has achieved a miraculous feat. She’s exposed a skeleton, but found something magnificently eerie and rich. She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a “miniature Iliad ”, taut, fluid and graceful, its tones knelling like bells into the clear air, ringing out in remembrance of all the untimely dead: “All vigorous men / All vanished”.

Alice Oswald, a Devonshire poet, is the winner of several prestigious prizes. She won the TS Eliot Prize in 2002, for DART. She also won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2007, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Ted Hughes for New Work in Poetry for her publications Weeds and Wild Flowers. Oswald studied Classics at Oxford. Memorial is her sixth collection, and a rewrite of Homer’s The Iliad, featuring the foot soldiers as the heroes. She explains the need behind her reworked viewpoint to the Guardian: “Every translation you pick up is so romantically involved with the main story that the ordinariness of Homer, which I love so much – the poem's amazing background of peculiar, real people, just being themselves – is almost invisible.”