This is the first time poets have been included among recipients of the Windham-Campbell prizes, with the Michigan-born political poet Carolyn Forché also receiving a grant.
On a recent evening, its owners Francisco Garamona and Nicolás Moguilevsky, both thirtysomething, were ending the day with some bottles of red Argentinian wine in the back room where they run Mansalva, a speciality press that publishes many first-time novelists and poets, as well as art books by Argentinian painters.
Atkinson, a published poet but first-time author, denied advocating that school children should stop using the terms boys and girls as widely reported.
The movie was directed by David Mackenzie ("Perfect Sense," "Young Adam"), working with a first-time script by Jonathan Asser, a poet whose creative-writing sessions with inmates gave way to general therapy for the most violent prisoners; he wound up working for twelve years in Wandsworth Prison (some of the movie is based on his experiences there).
The other eight poets are first-time contenders, and three of the selected works are début collections.
The same was true, Mr. Kitman suggested, of the opera "Nixon in China," a collaboration of the intellectual gadfly and director Peter Sellars, who came up with the idea; the first-time opera composer John Adams; and the poet and first-time librettist Alice Goodman.
Here is Claire: One of the more select events of the day brought the Dutch Iranian writer Kader Abdollah together with the Indian poet, activist and first-time novelist Meena Kandasamy in a discussion of "Massacre and Modernity".
The Guardian's books editor, Claire Armitstead, hailed the first win for poetry in the prize's 17-year history, adding that it was "only the second time a poet has even made the shortlist".
Browsing among the famously untidy shelves, it was here he read Dylan Thomas and RS Thomas for the first time; both poets became inspirations for the mature artist.
Yet while she seems very much at peace with herself and with her ghosts, she still burns white hot onstage, thrashing and raging (against George W. Bush, against the Iraq war) with the same propulsive energy and purpose that first drove this one-time poet to turn up the volume alongside the guitarist Lenny Kaye.
