Sean O'Brien FRSL (born 19 December 1952) is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize (1995, 2001 and 2007) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only three poets (the others being Ted Hughes and John Burnside) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems (The Drowned Book).
Born in London, England, O'Brien grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived since 1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford, for 2016–17.
Career
O Brien's book of essays on contemporary poetry, The Deregulated Muse (Bloodaxe), was published in 1998, as was his anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (Picador). Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976–2001 (Picador) was published in 2002. His new verse version of Dante's Inferno was published by Picador in October 2006. O'Brien's six collections of poetry to date have all won awards. In 2007, he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize for The Drowned Book (Picador, 2007). This was the first time a poet had been awarded the Forward and the Eliot prizes in the same year.
In 2006, he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and was previously Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. He is a Vice-President of the Poetry Society. He was co-founder of the literary magazine The Printer's Devil, contributes reviews to newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement and is a regular broadcaster on radio. His writing for television includes "Cousin Coat", a poem-film in Wordworks (Tyne Tees Television, 1991); "Cantona", a poem-film in On the Line (BBC2, 1994); Strong Language, a 45-minute poem-film (Channel 4, 1997) and The Poet Who Left the Page, a profile of Simon Armitage (BBC4, 2002). Other significant work includes a radio adaptation for BBC Radio 4 of "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
O'Brien was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
Awards and honours
1979 – Eric Gregory Award
1984 – Somerset Maugham Award – The Indoor Park
1988 – Cholmondeley Award
1992 Northern Arts Literary Fellowship
1993 – E. M. Forster Award
1995 – Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) – Ghost Train
2001 – Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) – Downriver
2001 – Northern Writer of the Year Award
2001 – T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) – Downriver
2006 – Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem for Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright) 2007 – Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award 2007 – Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection) – The Drowned Book 2007 – T. S. Eliot Prize – The Drowned Book 2007 – Royal Society of Literature fellowship 2012 – Griffin Poetry Prize International shortlist – November
Bibliography
Poetry
Collections
1987: The Frighteners (Bloodaxe) 1989: Boundary Beach (Ulsterman Publications) 1991: HMS Glasshouse (Oxford University Press) 1993: A Rarity (Carnivorous Arpeggio) 1995: Ghost Train (Oxford University Press) 1995: Penguin Modern Poets 5 (with Simon Armitage and Tony Harrison) (Penguin) 1997: The Ideology (Smith/Doorstep) 2001: Downriver (Picador) 2002: Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976–2001 (Picador) 2002: Rivers (with John Kinsella and Peter Porter) (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Australia) 2006: Inferno: a verse version of Dante's Inferno (Picador) 2007: The Drowned Book (Picador) 2009: Night Train (with artist Birtley Aris) (Flambard Press) 2011: November (Picador) 2015: The Beautiful Librarians (Picador) 2018: Europa (Picador) 2019: Contributor to A New Divan, A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West, Gingko Library, 2020: It Says Here (Picador) 2022: Embark (Picador)
Anthologies (edited) 1998: The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (editor) (Picador) 2008: Andrew Marvell: poems selected by Sean O'Brien (Poet to Poet series, Faber and Faber)
List of poems
Plays
2000: Laughter When We're Dead
2001: My Last Barmaid
2001: Downriver, cowritten with Keith Morris
2002: The Birds: a new verse version of Aristophanes' Birds (Methuen) 2003: Keepers of the Flame (Methuen) 2003: Live Theatre: Six Plays from the North East (with Cecil Taylor, Tom Hadaway, Alan Plater, Lee Hall, Julia Darling) (Methuen)