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Alice Oswald won the Forward Prize 1996 with The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, the T S Eliot Award with Dart (Faber), the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2006 with Woods, Etc., the inaugural Ted Hughes Award with Weeds and Wild Flowers, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2009 for her contribution to poetry. She lives in Devon with her husband and two children.

MEMORIAL An Excavation of the ILIAD was published by Faber & Faber in October 2011.

Praise for MEMORIAL:

‘All poetry has a memorial aspect – the fixing of a moment, a place, the passing of a life. But this is remembering on a grand scale. This is a concentrated, intense, multi-tasking elegy. And it is written with a freshness to match Homer's own – as if each soldier had died on the day of writing.’ -Kate Kellaway in The Observer

Ms Oswald has audaciously set out to translate the book’s atmosphere, rather than its story. A poet known for her landscape verse, Ms Oswald read classics at Oxford. The result is a work by someone who not only understands Homer’s Greek, but who also has an ear for modern verse. It is a delight to read. (...) Read Alice Oswald in order to be reminded how such an everlasting work can still shock, even in the 21st century. -The Economist

Oswald has achieved a miraculous feat. She’s exposed a skeleton, but found something magnificently eerie and rich. She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a “miniature Iliad ”, taut, fluid and graceful, its tones knelling like bells into the clear air, ringing out in remembrance of all the untimely dead: “All vigorous men / All vanished”. -The Telegraph

Praise for DART (2010):

'Oswald joins Ciaran Carson, Iain Sinclair, Hughes and ultimately Joyce himself as one of the great celebrants of the genius loci, the spirit of place, or what the Irish call dinnseanchas, lovingly elaborated topographical lore. According to Stephen Dedalus, Epictetus was "an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water". Oswald has soul in riverfuls.' The Guardian