The poet, editor and critic Mick Imlah was born in Aberdeen on 26 September 1956. Brought up near Glasgow and in Kent, he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, studying under John Fuller, with whom he would later collaborate. His DPhil – not submitted – was on Arthurian legends in Victorian poetry. From 1983 to 1986, Imlah was the editor of The Poetry Review, and from 1992 he worked at the Times Literary Supplement. His collections are The Zoologist’s Bath (Sycamore Press, 1982); his first full collection, Birthmarks (Chatto & Windus, 1988); and Diehard (published as a limited edition of 200 copies by Clutag Press in 2006). His poems also appeared in Penguin New Poets 3 (1994). He edited The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (with Robert Crawford, 2000) and made selections for Faber & Faber of the poems of Tennyson and Edwin Muir. The Lost Leader (Faber & Faber), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation in Autumn 2008, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize. Imlah was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2007; he died, aged just 52, on 12 January 2009.
Shortlisted Works
