Sean O’Brien is a UK poet, critic, broadcaster and editor. He grew up in Hull, England, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the recipient of the 2007 Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2009 Novi Sad International Writer’s Award. His books include, in 1998, essays on contemporary poetry, The Deregulated Muse, and an anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945, and in 2006, a new verse version of Dante’s Inferno. His selected poems, Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 was published in 2002. His six individual poetry collections have all won awards in the UK, most recently The Drowned Book, which won both the 2007 Forward and T S Eliot Prizes, the first time a book has won both awards.
The poems "Cousin Coat " and "The Iron Hand" appeared in Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 (Pikador, 2002); "The Lost War" and "Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright" - in The Drowned Book (Pikador, 2007)