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

2007 Awardee: Jen Hadfield

I am so very grateful for my Dewar Award. The faith and the funding it represented renewed my faith in my own creative purpose.

Biography

Jen Hadfield has worked as a professional poet since 2002 when she received a writer’s bursary from the Scottish Arts Council. Her first collection, Almanacs, was published when she was 27 and won first prize in the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Awards in 2003.

Her Gregory Award funded an extended reading tour in Canada and the US, during which time she produced her second collection of poetry Nigh-No-Place which is due to be published in early 2008.

She is considered to be one of the brightest and most talented poets of her generation working in Britain. Her work displays verve and panache and her descriptions of landscape and natural forces is quite unique.

A permanent resident of Shetland since 2006, Jen is taking her work in a new direction to bring literature and visual arts together. In 2006 she exhibited at the Peedie Gallery in Orkney, a prototype of the folk-art she intends to develop.

How the Award Helped

The Dewar Arts Award will fund Jen as she realises Nigh-No-Place, a collection of contemporary miniature landscapes of Shetland onto tin and found objects, with text.

Since the Award

Congratulations to Jen for winning the T S Eliot Prize 2008 for Nigh-No-Place. Previous winners of this top poetry prize include Sean O’Brian, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.  Chair of the judges, Andrew Motion, said, “We are absolutely delighted that Jen Hadfield has won this year’s T S Eliot Prize.  Nigh-No-Place shows that she is a remarkably original poet near the beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career.”

Jen writes that, “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.”

Winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize 2012. Listen to Jen reading her winning poem The Kids here.

Winner of the Highland Book Prize in 2021 for The Stone Age.

Recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2024.

Jen Hadfield – A Writing Life from Scottish Poetry Library on Vimeo.

Jen Hadfield reads in Grasmere

I am so very grateful for my Dewar Award. The faith and the funding it represented renewed my faith in my own creative purpose.

2007 Awardee: Jenni Fagan

I cannot wait to begin my BA in Norwich and I am really excited about the work I plan to do there.

Biography

Jenni has been writing creatively since she was in primary school where she won competitions for short stories and poems. Since then, her writing achievements are impressive and to date include winning a national competition in 2004 to represent Scotland at the European Young Playwrights Forum in Athens and in 2006 reaching the final six in a national competition organised by the Playwrights Studio Scotland which entitles her to be mentored by the Studio.

Jenni not only shows incredible talent and promise as a writer, she has a unique voice and poetic originality.

Jenni has built up a substantial body of work already; one book of poetry, an autobiographical novel, three plays, two film scripts, many short stories and countless outlines for future work.

She has been published in Brand Literary Magazine, Flux, Dope USA, Underground Poetix Instanbul, Tate Modern, Graffiti Kalkota India, Dwang Anthology, Beat Anthology and Unthology amongst others.

How the Award Helped

The Dewar Arts Award will support Jenni through a degree in creative writing at Norwich School of Art & Design, and later at Greenwich University.

Since the Award

In 2010 Jenni graduated with a first-class degree. In the same year her novel The Panopticon was completed and her art installation The Scold’s Bridle, a collaboration wth the words of women in prison, was exhibited at Greenwich Gallery.

Her first collection of poetry Urchin Belle, published by Blackheath Books, was a sell-out and her second collection The Dead Queen of Bohemia is published in 2010.

While an undergraduate, Jenni facilitated a writers’ group at Norfolk Blind Association. She begins her first Writer’s Residency at Lewisham Hospital in late 2010. Jenni has accepted a place on the MA course at Royal Holloway, taught by Andrew Motion, starting in the autumn of 2010.

In 2013, Jenni’s novel The Panopticon was nominated for a for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. Click here for further details.

Jenni took part in our Tenth Anniversary Celebrations, where she led a Meet the Artist session with fellow Awardee Jonathan Boyd.

I cannot wait to begin my BA in Norwich and I am really excited about the work I plan to do there.

2007 Awardee: Laura Helyer

I was thrilled to hear that I have been offered an award.

Biography

Suffolk-born Laura Helyer’s long-term ambition is to become a published writer of poetry and literary fiction. She recently completed an M.Litt in Creative Writing (poetry) with distinction from St Andrews and is now working towards a PhD.

Laura moved to Dumfries in Galloway in 2005. Whilst there, her poem sequence ‘Camera Obscura’ was the joint winner of the Kirkpatrick Dobie prize. Following this success, Laura was invited to participate in a poetry scheme which involved being mentored to produce a collection of poems for a public reading and being paired with an established poet to perform her poems. Laura read with the well-known poet Adrian Mitchell, who was greatly impressed with her work.

Other achievements include in 2006 being runner-up in the prestigious Cardiff International Poetry Competition with her poem ‘The Heron’ and in 2005 having her short story ‘Green Angel’ commended in The Eildon Tree magazine writing competition and subsequently published in their anthology. More recently in 2007, Laura won first place in the Kirkpatrick Dobie Poetry Prize and second place in the Muriel Carmichael Prize (for prose essay).

Laura is considered to have the potential to become an important voice in British poetry as her work becomes more widely published. Already she has shown to have unusual talent combined with intelligence and an ability to write with a language of precision and rare sensitivity.

How the Award Helped

The Dewar Arts Award is providing financial support while Laura works on a series of poems and on a novel.

Since the Award

Laura writes, “[A] Dewar Award has enabled creative time, space and opportunities for which I have been extremely grateful.” Laura has sent her first collection of poetry, including a sequence of poems about the artists Joan Eardley, to a publisher. She lives in Dumfries & Galloway where she is an active member of the writing community.

I was thrilled to hear that I have been offered an award.