This week in our poetry news round up we look at the death of the Scottish poet Douglas Dunn and the winner of this year’s James Laughlin Award.
Scottish Poet Douglas Dunn Passes Away Aged 83
Douglas Dunn, the award-winning Scottish poet, critic and teacher, has died at the age of 83. Dunn passed away on Friday 16th October, just a week short of his 84th birthday, which would have been today. Best known for his debut collection Terry Street and the deeply moving Elegies, he was described by his friend and former colleague Don Paterson as “the finest Scottish poet of the post-war period”.
Born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire in 1942, Dunn grew up in a working-class family, his father working for a local tyre company. Lacking the maths and science qualifications needed to study English at a Scottish university, he trained as a librarian instead, and in 1964 moved to Ohio with his first wife, Lesley, to work at Akron Public Library. Back in Britain he enrolled at Hull University, graduating with a first-class degree in English in 1969, and went on to work in the university library under Philip Larkin. The pair got on well and shared a love of jazz, although they rarely talked about poetry.
That same year Faber published Terry Street, named after the Hull street where Dunn and Lesley lived. Its candid portraits of working-class life marked him out as a major new voice, and collections including Love or Nothing (1974), Barbarians (1979) and St Kilda’s Parliament (1981) followed. After Lesley died of cancer in 1981, aged just 37, he wrote Elegies, a sequence on grief and loss that won the 1985 Whitbread Prize not only for poetry but as Book of the Year overall.
Dunn returned to Scotland as writer in residence at the University of Dundee before moving to St Andrews, where he became a professor of English in 1991. There he founded the Scottish Studies Centre and brought in writers such as John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, A.L. Kennedy and Paterson to teach creative writing. Later highlights included the verse novel The Donkey’s Ears (2000) and a T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisting in 2017 for The Noise of a Fly. He was awarded an OBE in 2003 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013.
Dunn is survived by his wife Beth, whom he married in 2024, and his two children, Robbie and Lilias.
2026 James Laughlin Award Winner Announced
Dior J. Stephens has been named the winner of the 2026 James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets for ATOMIC I, a second collection due from Nightboat Books in 2027. Running since 1954, the award recognises and supports a poet’s second book ahead of publication, and is named after the poet and publisher James Laughlin, who founded New Directions in 1936.
Structured around the atomic bomb tests, ATOMIC I weaves together history, culture and identity. Judges Anastacia-Reneé, Sherwin Bitsui and Patrick Rosal praised its experimental form and rich imagery, calling it a “poetically explosive interrogation of the usage of ‘I'”, with poems that use the first person both to reveal and to conceal.
Stephens, who lives in Cincinnati, debuted with CRUEL/CRUEL (Nightboat, 2023), a finalist for the 2024 Ohioana Book Award. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Sewanee and the Lambda Literary Foundation, Stephens is also co-editor-in-chief of Foglifter Journal & Press.
Alongside the $5,000 cash prize, Stephens wins an all-expenses-paid, week-long residency at The Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach, and the Academy will send copies of the book to around 1,200 of its members. It puts Stephens in fine company, with past winners of the award including Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee and Tracy K. Smith.
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