Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes
Ian’s poem ‘Return of the discotheque dancers’ – originally featured in The Rialto – was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2018. The poem is a celebration of the many lives lost to AIDS in the early years of the disease, a time when AIDS and HIV patients were often shamed and ostracised by the media and the wider British public. The poem is published in The Forward Book of Poetry 2019, which showcases a selection of the best contemporary poetry published in the British Isles over the last year.
“These annual anthologies of the poems in the running for the Forward Prizes remain the best way of encountering the richness that new poetry has to offer.”
The Daily Telegraph