Prestigious Literary Award For Chiswick Poet Cahal Dallat

Writer and broadcaster wins the 2017 Keats-Shelley prize

Well known Chiswick poet, writer and broadcaster Cahal Dallat has been announced as winner of the 2017 Keats-Shelley prize for poetry.

The award was made for his poem Giant which was recently featured as the Saturday Poem in The Guardian. The poem was written about Cahal's friend Chris Greener, who died in 2015, and was, for more than 40 years, Britain's tallest man.

The award is made following an annual competition for essays and poems on Romantic themes. The Keats-Shelley Prize was inaugurated in 1998 to encourage writers to respond creatively to the work of the Romantics.

Cahal Dallat with the chair of the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize, Baroness Floella Benjamin

Born in County Antrim but a long time resident of Chiswick, Cahal is the Causley Trust’s centenary-year musician and poet-in-residence at Cyprus Well House in Cornwall.

The Charles Causley Trust exists to keep alive the memory of the late Charles Causley and to promote writing in the community and region in which he lived. A central focus of the work of The Charles Causley Trust is the continued development of Charles Causley’s House in Launceston, Cornwall, and its preservation and interpretation for future generations. Cahal will be writing new settings for Causley's poetry as part of his role.

Cahal's writing has appeared in the TLS and the Guardian and he is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio Four's Saturday Review. His latest collection is The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff).

He is currently spearheading a campaign to have a statue to poet WB Yeats in Bedford Park in a bid to create a public artwork marking the 19th century London artists’-colony where Nobel-prizewinning poet/dramatist WB Yeats lived.

Cahal is married to poet and arts organiser Anne-Marie Fyfe and they have two children. You can find out more about his work in the literary world at his website.

May 7, 2017