Prize for Ian Seed’s Poetry Collection

Creating Writing tutor Dr Ian Seed has been awarded the 2015 Monograph Prize by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Chester, for his prose-poetry collection Makers of Empty Dreams (Shearsman, 2014).

With a sparse, haunting, often playful lyricism, the makers of empty dreams emerge like figures in the reels of an old, almost abandoned film. Their stories, often set in different countries which we may or may not know, tell of loss and estrangement, of betrayal and reconciliation, and of a search for the possibilities of renewal along the way.

The poet Ian McMillan has said of the collection: ‘These are superb pieces that give us a glimpse into some kind of translated backlit European hinterland full of the music of menace and desire. I read them in my conservatory in Barnsley and I was instantly transported to a city that I half-knew, full of people I wanted to meet or avoid. Prose poetry at its very best.’