Burns’ Auction / Sarah Maguire Prize / John Clare Countryside Project – Poetry News Roundup September 13th

This week’s poetry round up takes a look at a first edition up for auction, the winners of the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation and the John Clare Countryside Project.

First Edition of Burns Poetry Book Goes to Auction

A rare first edition copy of a book of poetry written by Robert Burns, which was published in 1786, will be going up for auction later this month.

The book of poems, which has been mainly written in the Scottish dialect, is expected to fetch somewhere between £50,000 and £60,000.

The book, which is titled Poems Chiefly In The Scottish Dialect, was published by a printers in Kilmarnock and will be part of a books and manuscripts auction that will take place on 19th September. The auctioneers consider it to be one of the most important works of Scottish literature to have been written. When the book was originally put up for sale it was one of just 612 copies, and priced at three shillings. It sold out in just a month.

Burns was 27 when the book was published, and it contains a number of his most popular poems including “To A Mouse” and “The Twa Dogs”.

Edinburgh University Press believe that there are only 88 known surviving copies of this particular book, which is said to be one of the most important collections of the poet’s work.

Sarah Maguire Poetry in Translation Prize

The Georgian poet Lia Sturua and translators Natalia Bukia-Peters and Victoria Field have been named as the winners of this year’s Sarah Maguire Poetry in Translation Prize for “On the Contrary”.

This is a biennial international award that is given for a poetry book in an English translation that is written by a living poet who hails from beyond Europe. The prize is split between the poet and the translators.

Sarah Maguire was herself a champion of international poetry and the founder of the Poetry Translation Centre. She died in 2017. The winning work was announced during a ceremony that took place in London on 9th September.

Speaking on behalf of the judging panel Ian McMillan said that the book

Sturua was born in 1939 in Georgia and lectured at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. In 1999 she became a literature consultant. “Trees in the City”, her first collection was published in 1962, and has since been followed by a further 12 books of poetry, some prose and three novels. Her poetry has been translated in to English, French, German and Finnish.

Land that Inspired Poet Part of Reclaiming Habitats Project

A group of volunteers are working to open up corridors of land and reclaim habitats as part of a project that will honour the poet, John Clare. One of the most well known nature poets in the UK, Clare was a 19th century poet who grew up in Cambridgeshire. He wrote about the loss of much of the scenery that he remembered from his childhood.

The John Clare Countryside Project aims to connect Peterborough to Stamford in Lincolnshire by creating green corridors of farmland.