Michael Symmons Roberts


Michael Symmons Roberts FRSL is a British poet.
He has published seven collections of poetry, all with Cape, and has won the Forward Prize, the Costa Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, as well as major prizes from the Arts Council and Society of Authors. He has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. He has also written novels, libretti and texts for oratorios and song cycles. He regularly writes and presents documentaries and dramas for broadcasting and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Life and career

Michael Symmons Roberts spent his childhood in Lancashire before moving south with his family to Newbury in Berkshire in the early '70s. He went to comprehensive school in Newbury, then to Regent's Park College, Oxford to read Philosophy and Theology. After graduating, he trained as a newspaper journalist before joining the BBC in Cardiff as a radio producer in 1989. He moved with the BBC to London, then to Manchester, initially in radio, then as a documentary filmmaker. His last job at the corporation was as Executive Producer and Head of Development for BBC Religion and Ethics, before he left the BBC to focus on writing.
Symmons Roberts' family was passively secular, but in his early teens he became a thoroughgoing atheist. When he gained a place at Oxford, this led him to change his course to Theology and philosophy, and his college to a Christian one, simply so that he could talk believers out of their faith. But things did not go according to plan: "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away. I realized that atheism was just as culturally conditioned as being a Catholic."
The Oxford way of teaching, with its deconstructing, analytical approach, proved fatal, he says, to his assumption as "a naively dogmatic young atheist... that atheism is exactly the same as 'common sense' or objectivity. I'm not saying that in psychological terms we can't be objective. I just mean that there is no framework of thought that can be completely objective. I have exactly the same problem with unquestioning religious dogmatism."
A convert to Roman Catholicism, Symmons Roberts has been described by Jeanette Winterson as "a religious poet for a secular age", and by Les Murray as "a poet for the new chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned". Miguel Cullen described his " millimetric adjective, the air-tight, wool-swaddled image, and that child's forensic perception, he never grew out of". Alan Brownjohn wrote that his "religious poems... seem designed for an age of doubt and DNA". Although rooted in the English lyric tradition, his work draws on the language of science, theology and philosophy.

Work

His fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for best collection, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He had previously received the Society of Authors' Gregory Award for British poets under 30 and the K Blundell Trust Award, and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize for his 2001 collection Burning Babylon. In 2007 he received a major Arts Council Writers Award. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the English Association, for services to the language arts. In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His sixth collection, Drysalter won the 2013 Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.
His continuing collaboration with composer James MacMillan has led to two BBC Proms choral commissions, song cycles, music theatre works and a new opera for the Welsh National Opera, The Sacrifice, which won the 2008 Royal Philharmonic Society Award.
His work for radio includes 'A Fearful Symmetry' – for Radio 4 – which won the Sandford St Martin Prize, 'Soldiers in the Sun' – for Radio 3 – which won the Clarion Award, and 'Last Words' commissioned by Radio 4 to mark the first anniversary of 9/11. His first novel, Patrick's Alphabet, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2006, and his second, Breath, in 2008. He is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a trustee of the Arvon Foundation. He has judged many poetry awards including the Forward Prizes, the Eliot Prize and the Arvon International Poetry Prize.

Awards and honours

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Books