Whitbread Prize for Lancaster Lecturer

Paul Farley, lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, has won the Whitbread Book Award for the best poetry collection of 2002.

The winning collection, The Ice Age, was a Poetry Book Society Choice for the summer of 2002, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. His first collection, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (Picador, 1998), won a Forward Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award; it was also shortlisted for

the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The following year he was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. From 2000-2002 he was writer-in-residence at The Wordsworth

Trust in Grasmere.

Fellow lecturer in the department George Green comments, "We're delighted and proud that Paul has been recognised in this fashion, and feel that it is a tribute to the Dept of English and Creative Writing that it is able to attract writers of this calibre".

Graduates from the department have gone on to win prizes and publication by leading publishers and magazines. Recent and widely acclaimed novels by our graduates include:

Ingenious Pain, Andrew Miller (Sceptre, 1997). Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Impac Prize.

The Changeling, Alison MacLeod (Macmillan, 1996)

Does It Show?, Paul Magrs (Chatto, 1996)

House of Rooms, Siri Reynolds (Polygon, 1997)

The Drink and Dream Teahouse, Justin Hill (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000)