Laird emerged as a bright young voice in the late 1990s, although he points out he was in fact 30 before he published his first book: "I was no Muldoon, publishing at 20." A sense of literary celebrity also attached to him from the beginning by virtue of his marriage to the novelist Zadie Smith. He publishes his third volume of poetry, Go Giants (Faber), this month and has also written two novels. "I have always written fiction and I think I'm not bad at it, and while there is no hierarchy between oranges and apples, poetry is my first love and remains special to me as a unique art form that can do things like nothing else." The second half is a single long poem, "Progress", in which he moves through his own and Northern Ireland's history. "Progress is a very Northern Irish word. It's often used in news reports in terms of the peace process. Wallace Stevens said that when you write a long poem, many things drop from it. I wanted to find a way of gathering up lots of things about growing up in Northern Ireland without keeping them in a discrete time-frame." In his review of Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, Auden quotes Berlin’s famous thesis: hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision,” while the foxes “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” Dante, Plato, Hegel, Proust, Nietzsche, and Ibsen are hedgehogs, while Herodotus, Aristotle, Molière, Montaigne, Goethe, and Joyce are foxes. Auden goes on:

The Forward Arts Foundation, which runs the awards, also announced that next year’s judging panels will be chaired by Bernardine Evaristo and Joelle Taylor. Evaristo will chair the panel judging the collection length entries, while Taylor will chair the panel focusing on best single poem and a new category for best single poem – performed. Laird is currently working on a third novel, alongside husbanding his ongoing cache of poems, editing an anthology of poetry with Don Paterson – "no real theme beyond poems that we like" – as well as working on a TV project with Smith ("something historical and not an adaptation"). They previously collaborated on a projected Kafka musical with a musician friend that went unfinished, and Laird says that while they regularly engage with each other's writing, "it has been nice to work together on a new project". Astonishingly fluent, Auden could write poems of immense power that take their subject matter head-on. When it came to love poems, more circumspection was needed, but using the second-person pronoun licensed a direct approach of sorts: “Lay your sleeping head, my love.” Though he later became famous for lines that have the feel of diagnostic epigrams (“We must love one another or die”) or generalizing maxims (“About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters”), the early poems are necessarily oblique, and this vital hedging and coding gives rise to a new style. “Audenesque” came to mean minatory, knowing, allusive, densely enigmatic. Behind that approach lies also a very English irony, a refusal to stand entirely foursquare behind the thing being said, a tone that allows some play within it. And play, for Auden, created a space where he could exist in his complexities.

The received idea about Auden is that in the later work the complicated ambiguous truths elicited by play, by the parabolic, are overtaken by a more public, more life-involved tone, and the received idea is mostly true. It’s also thought that Auden’s American years produced less memorable and influential poems, although this is a more arguable proposal. The later books contain more than a few works of genius: Nones (1951) has “In Praise of Limestone,” and The Shield of Achilles (1955) contains “Bucolics” and the title poem, which strike me as being among the most accomplished things Auden—or anyone—ever wrote. The second line’s unusual syntax replicates the cumbersome nature of the body, so the subject of the sentence, the soul, the “it,” finds itself in the middle of the clause swamped on either side by excess, the mild alliteration of “the body became for” on one side and on the other the assonance of “too large a garment.” There is a sense of menace in that buried phrase “came for it” as one might come for a condemned man. We've lived in 13 places in 13 years. I love lots of things about America, but there's so much that is completely crazy: the health system; obviously the gun thing. To be away from your home as a writer can be good in some ways, but can also be a limitation, especially as a poet. To be away from your first language can be difficult, but at the same time Joyce – not that Joyce has anything to do with me – reconstructed Dublin from Zürich and Paris and I suppose I've just written a new book which sometimes seems as if it's entirely about Northern Ireland." Take the fifteenth poem (they are numbered rather than titled) of the thirty in his first collection: While adults rave over Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 Women’s Prize winner Hamnet, children have been enthralled by her new picture book Where Snow Angels Go, illustrated with quiet beauty by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini. Sylvie wakes in the night with a fever to discover that she has a snow angel guardian keeping her safe.

More seriously in regard to that anthology, I would hope to be of the tradition. There's one and half million people in Northern Ireland so it is obviously over-represented as far as world-class writers go. And that is not a coincidence. Where there is a tradition in a culture of respect and application to an art form, then that art form tends to get good. Of course you want to be a part of it." He says it wasn't until he left Ireland for Cambridge that he really appreciated that his upbringing had been unusual. "There were, taking into account the usual complexities, essentially two separate realities, a Catholic one and a Protestant one, that would meet every now and again in certain bloody ways."Auden is, I think, 31. I am 23. I don’t know Auden, but I think he sounds bad: the heavy, jocular prefect, the boy bushranger, the school wag, the 6th form debater, the homosexual clique-joker. I think he sometimes writes with great power: “O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven, Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart.” I can’t agree he’s as bad as [Archibald] MacLeish. He’s overpraised of course. I’ve added my own little dollop of praise in a number of New Verse devoted entirely, with albino portrait and manuscript, to gush and pomp about him. He’s exactly what the English literary public think a modern English poet should be. He’s perfectly educated (& expensively) but still delightfully eccentric…. He’s just what he should be: let him rant his old communism, it’s only a young man’s natural rebelliousness, (& besides, it doesn’t convert anybody: the awarding of conservative prizes to anti-conservatives who are found to be socially harmless is a fine, soothing palliative, & a shrewd gesture. And, incidentally too, the rich minority can always calm down a crier of “Equality for All” by giving him individual equality with themselves). Shortlisted alongside Sy-Quia were Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd, The English Summer by Holly Hopkins, Some Integrity by Padraig Regan, and Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. In general it is true that the diagnostician took over, and in the later poems an urbane, benevolent, slightly smug Auden is forever lecturing, warning, or advising his readers. Also, the poems became very long indeed. “New Year Letter” (1941), “For the Time Being” (1944), and The Age of Anxiety might be rated partial successes. “For the Time Being” (subtitled “A Christmas Oratorio”) began life as a libretto for Benjamin Britten and has good bits—the wise men, the narrator—as well as long, indigestible passages, particularly Saint Simeon’s meditation: Mendelson has been studying, explicating, and collating Auden’s work for more than fifty years, since Auden asked him, around 1970, when Mendelson was a young teacher at Yale, to help organize his uncollected essays into what became Forewords and Afterwords (1973). Mendelson, recalling the selection process to another biographer of Auden’s, Richard Davenport-Hines, said the poet