The University of Glasgow has secured its place as a centre of creative writing excellence with poems by two members of staff and one student listed amongst Scotland’s Best Poems.

The list, compiled by award-winning novelist and poet Alan Spence for leading poetry website The Scottish Poetry Library, features 20 of Scotland’s best poems from 2007.

Professors Tom Leonard and Willy Maley from the Department of English Literature were both recognised for their poems Being a Human Being and On My Father’s Refusal to Renew his Subscription to The Beijing Review respectively.

Student of the University’s renowned Creative Writing MLitt Course, Mandy Haggith, also featured in the top 20 with her poem Yichang.

Author of Stone Garden, The Magic Flute and Way to Go, Alan Spence said: “The poems I chose, I realise, all have that quality of heightened awareness, a sense of the very life we are living, its sheer miraculousness. Poetry at its best can do that - it's a wake-up call, exhorting us to look and see what's all around us and within us.”

The annual Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems are selected, from poems printed in books, pamphlets and literary magazines, by a leading figure in the literary world. Previous editors of the list have included Janice Galloway, Hamish Whyte and Richard Price.

The full list of poems can be viewed at http://www.spl.org.uk/best-poems/poems.htm

Notes to editors

For more information please contact Kate Richardson in the University of Glasgow’s Media Relations Office on 0141 330 3683 or email K.Richardson@admin.gla.ac.uk

First published: 5 December 2007

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