Waterhouse winner Sophie scoops Eric Gregory Award

Congratulations to North East poet Sophie F Baker, who won an Eric Gregory Award at the Authors’ Awards 2012 ceremony last night (14 June). The Eric Gregory Award is for collections by poets under the age of 30. The awards were launched in 1960 and the list of previous winners, which includes the likes of Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy and Sean O’Brien, reads like a Who’s Who of British poetry. In 2010, Sophie won the Andrew Waterhouse Award, which is part of the Northern Writers’ Awards.

Also among the silverware was Elizabeth Day, who picked up a Betty Trask Award, which are given for first novels by writers under 35, for Scissors, Paper, Stone, which she’d been talking about with our Newcastle Book Group just a couple of days earlier.

For a full list of winners, see www.societyofauthors.org.