‘Poems are made things, not language as raw expression,’ says Polley (CRF 2007) and Moth Poetry Prize winner, during an interview with The Irish Times.
Polley won an Eric Gregory Award in 2004, and at the age of 29 he was chosen as one of the 20 Next Generation poets, alongside Patience Agbabi and Alice Oswald. He was twice nominated for the TS Eliot Prize before winning it for his fourth collection, Jackself, described by the judges as “a firework of a book; inventive, exciting and outstanding in its imaginative range and depth of feeling”. His previous collection, The Havocs, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and his first novel, Talk of the Town, won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. Jacob has held residencies in Queensland, at the Wordsworth Trust and at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge for two years. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.