Craig Raine | Biography

The effective impact of Craig Raine on contemporary British poetry may be dated roughly from summer 1977, when his poem "Flying to Belfast, 1977" took first prize in the Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition and Raine began an eighteen-month stint as book editor for the New Review. The following year "Mother Dressmaking" also won the Cheltenham first prize; his first collection of poems was published; and "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" shared the New Statesman's Prudence Farmer Award for the best poem published in its pages during 1978. Raine was to win this award again in 1980 with "Laying a Lawn," while "In the Mortuary" took second prize in the 1978 National Poetry Competition: both of these poems were included in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), his second book, which has to date been reprinted five times and has given a name to that Martian school of which...
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