Eavan Boland announced as winner of Costa Poetry Award: Posthumous honour for poet who died in 2020
Eavan Boland, pictured here in 2011, has won the Costa Poetry Award for The Historians.
Late Irish poet Eavan Boland has been announced as the winner of the Costa Poetry Award. The Dublin-born poet, who passed away last April following a stroke at the age of 75, took the prestigious prize for her final collection, The Historians.
Boland's book succeeds last year's winner, Flèche by Mary Jean Chan, and is the first win in the poetry section for an Irish poet. Originally founded in 1971 as the Whitbread Book Awards, in 1986 the UK coffee house brand took over the sponsorship of the annual awards for writers based in Britain and Ireland.
The £5,000 prize will go to the late poet's estate. Boland is survived by her husband Kevin Casey and her two daughters, Sarah and Eavan.
The Costa judges described The Historians as “an extraordinary book of lyrical power that has some of the finest lines of poetry written this century”. As with much of Boland's previous work, poems in the collection address themes around the lives of women, specifically how revisiting their often-forgotten stories can change our sense of the past.
The other books on this year's shortlist for the poetry award were Caroline Bird's The Air Year; My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long; and Martha Sprackland's Citadel.
Boland's collection now joins the other category winners as a contender the for the overall Costa Book Of The Year, to be announced on January 26.
These are:
- First Novel: Love After Love, by Ingrid Persaud
- Novel: The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story, by Monique Roffey
- Biography: The Louder I Will Sing, by Lee Lawrence
- Children’s Book: Voyage of the Sparrowhawk, by Natasha Farrant
