The Wilfred Owen Association News

The Wilfred Owen Bursary - 2013 recipients announced

The Wilfred Owen Bursary - awarded each year to a promising poet, in the form of a course at the Arvon Writers' Centre at Ty Newydd, near Criccieth in North Wales - has this year been given to two worthy recipients: Carole Powell from Narberth in Pembrokeshire, and Andrea Gosling from East Grinstead in Sussex. The WOA is grateful to Ty Newydd for the financial help which has made it possible to award two bursaries this year.

The course will take place in April, and the tutors will be Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales - and also, of course, the most recent holder of the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award - and Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate. We congratulate Carole and Andrea, and we look forward to hearing from them about their experience of the course, and to seeing more of their work.

The Humane Society, debut pamphlet from Jodie Hollander

"The Humane Society" is the debut pamphlet from Jodie Hollander, recent recipient of a Wilfred Owen Association bursary.

"Romantic, surreal and tender, it paints a family portrait that is a mixture of memoir, ghost story and artistic obsession, as well as being an elegy for an older, more mannered, world".

Jodie is originally from Wisconsin and now lives and works in Washington DC. An alumni of the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa University, her poetry has appeared in a number of poetry magazines and journals both in the UK and America. She has also received a Fullbright Scholarship and is due to receive a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013. She was awarded the Wilfred Owen Association bursary to study at Ty Newydd in 2012.

The Humane Society is available from tall-lighthouse publishing

Click here for a scan of the cover

"The Glass Elephants", a sample poem from the pamphlet, can be downloaded from here.

NEW Owen inspired artwork in Craiglockhart

A new public artwork inspired by Wilfred Owen’s time at Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, has gone on display.

Entitled Hillside and designed by artist Lara Greene, the distinctive work was commissioned by the local community council and is located outside the Post Office on Colinton Road.

Wilfred Owen met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon at the former hydro in 1917.

Read more on the Edinburgh Evening News website

Birkenhead Institute Memorial Playing Fields development will go ahead

The Government will not prevent Tranmere Rovers building houses on Ingleborough Road Memorial Playing Fields in Birkenhead.

Wirrall Council approved the club's application to build up to 90 houses in October.

The building work was stalled while the Department for Communities and Local Government decided whether to scrutinise the application.

But Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, has now passed up the opportunity to intervene because the department has to be "very selective" about which applications it looks at.

More in the Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2012

The plans were opposed by the Wilfred Owen Association.

New statue of Wilfred Owen in Shrewsbury

Thousands of people cast their votes on the Shropshire Star’s website to pick their favourite Salopians from a shortlist of nine nominees. Wilfred Owen topped the male category, receiving more than 51 per cent of the vote.

Read more on the Shrewsbury Star website (November 27th)

Vote for a Wilfred Owen statue in Shrewsbury

The public are being asked to help choose three Shropshire heroes to be turned into life-sized statues. Wilfred Owen is on the shortlist.

Click here to vote

For more information, and for other ways of casting your vote, see the BBC Shropshire website

Please vote!

Tranmere Rovers' Wilfred Owen memorial field plan halted

The decision to approve an application to build up to 90 houses on the Ingleborough Road memorial field could be "called in" by the Department for Communities and Local Government.

The land was formerly part of Birkenhead Institute school and the fields and pavilion serve as a memorial to former pupils, including Wilfred Owen, who died in World War I.

BBC News, 13 November 2012

Tranmere Rovers Ingleborough playing field development plans are approved

Plans to develop the Birkenhead Institute's former playing field have been approved. The field is a memorial to former pupils – including Wilfred Owen – who died during World War I.

Wirral News, 31 October 2012

The Wilfred Owen Association objected to the proposal and submitted a consultation response. Click here to read it.

Wilfred Owen's birthplace given listed status

English Heritage has granted Plas Wilmot, where Owen was born on March 18th 1893, grade II listed status.

See also: War poet Wilfred Owen’s birthplace is given listed status (Shropshire Star, 15 October 2012)

In Memoriam - Dr Dominic Hibberd

The Wilfred Owen Association’s Committee was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Dr Dominic Hibberd. Dr Hibberd passed away on 12 August 2012 after a long illness. He was seventy.

Dominic Hibberd will be remembered as the second biographer of Wilfred Owen and as a penetrating analyst of Owen’s work. He was one of the WOA’s Vice Presidents.

Dr Hibberd was a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge and taught at universities in Britain, the U.S.A., and China before becoming a full-time writer. His biographies of Wilfred Owen (2002) and Harold Monro (2001) were highly praised, as was his critical study, Owen the Poet (1982). His most recent publication was the anthology The Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War (2007), edited by John Onions.

A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Dr Hibberd also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.

An appropriate event to remember Dominic Hibberd and his work will be announced in the next few months and details will be posted on this website as soon as they are available. A full obituary will also be published here shortly.

Selected obituaries

Dominic Hibberd

Daily Telegraph, 17 September 2012

Dominic Hibberd obituary

Leading authority on the life and work of the war poet Wilfred Owen.

Guardian, 12 September 2012

Dr Dominic Hibberd: expert on war poets

Oxford Mail, 30 August 2012