8 April 2024
Awardee News: Jen Hadfield
Dewar Awardee Jen Hadfield is one of the recipients of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prizes.
One of the most significant and prestigious international literary awards, the Windham-Campbell Prizes celebrate achievement across fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama. The prizes are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and recognise how challenging it can be to work in the creative industries. The award allows recipients to focus on their creative practice, independent of financial concerns. Writers do not apply for the prizes, but are instead nominated by an anonymous prize-giving committee.
A quote from the prize committee said: ‘Jen Hadfield’s intricate poems slow down time, reveal overlooked details of the natural world, and forge complex relationships between language, history, and place.’
In 2007, a Dewar Award supported Hadfield to travel to Mexico and research Mexican devotional folk art. This research trip inspired the creation of ‘Nigh-No-Place’, a solo exhibition of Shetland ex-votos in the style of sacred Mexican folk art – ‘tiny, portable, insistently familiar landscapes packed in an array of weathered tobacco tins, incorporating rubrics of very short fiction’.
Speaking of her Dewar Award, Jen said:
“The Dewar Award represented a green light to put my creative work first for most of a year… I consider the Dewar Award to have marked a crucial stage in my developing confidence as an artist in multiple disciplines.”
Jen’s second poetry collection ‘Nigh-No-Place’ won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2008, and her fourth poetry collection, The Stone Age, won the Highland Book Prize in 2021. Storm Pegs, her work of lyrical non-fiction about island life, will be published by Picador in July 2024.
Read more about Jen Hadfield on the Windham Campbell website
If you feel a Dewar Arts Award could support you in your progression as a young artist, or know someone else who might benefit, find out more about how to apply on our Eligibility and Application pages