Eavan Boland scoops Costa Poetry Award for her final book
Published on 5th January 2021
Dublin-born poet Eavan Boland, who died last spring at the age of 75, has posthumously won the prestigious Costa Poetry Award for her final collection of poems.
The former professor of English and humanities as well as the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University in California, won the prize for The Historians which was described by the judges as “some of the finest lines of poetry written this century.”
They describe the collection as “the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.”
Her Irish Times obituary said she “broke the mould of Irish poetry – and drew new audiences to the form – by making women’s experiences central to her poems”.
She grew up in London and New York before returning to Dublin where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1966 from Trinity College, followed by the publication of her first collection of poetry New Territory the following year.
This year's winning books
Ingrid Persaud won the Costa First Novel Award for Love After Love, her debut set in her native Trinidad. (Irish author Michelle Gallen had been shortlisted for Big Girl Small Town.) Monique Roffey, who is also from Trinidad, won the Costa Novel Award for her seventh book, The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story. Lee Lawrence, son of Brixton gun victim Cherry Groce, won the Costa Biography Award for his first book, the memoir, The Louder I Will Sing: A story of racism, riots and redemption. Please note that our reservations function is switched off during Level 5 restrictions for all library stock.
Natasha Farrant won the Costa Children’s Book Award with her twelfth book, Voyage of the Sparrowhawk and that is available on Borrowbox.
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The Costa Book Awards is the only major book prize open solely to authors resident in Britain and Ireland.