The idea for the Picador Poetry Prize came out of a conversation between Don Paterson and the Forward prize-winning poet John Stammers. “We were talking about why there wasn’t any equivalent in the UK to the Yale Series of Younger Poets which has been running in the US for about 90 years,” said Paterson, who was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry this year. “If you look at the list of past winners, it’s a roll call of the major US poets of the mid-20th century. John suggested we look into setting up a non-ageist version of the same thing, and this is what we’ve come up with.”

Read the rest of this article on The Guardian’s website. For full details of the prize and how to enter, see the publisher’s website

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