Mimi Khalvati will be awarded The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2023 for “her outstanding talent and ability to draw on diverse cultural traditions – Iranian, English and American – to enrich British poetry”.
The award committee is chaired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage who described Khalvati as a “pioneering and adventurous voice”.
Carcanet has published Khalvati since 1991 and will bring out her collected poems in November 2024.
Her last book, Afterwardness, was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card and a Sunday Times Book of the Year.
Khalvati said: “When I first received news of my award, I felt amazed, incredulous and not a little terrified. But more than that, I just felt happy. To receive such an affirmation of my work and to be numbered among the wonderful poets who have been previous recipients is an honour and privilege.”
She added: “I started writing late in life and have always felt myself to be serving an unending apprenticeship, steeped in the process of becoming a poet, and never actually being one. But now, in my 80th year, I am! And through my writing years I have been lucky enough to see many barriers of gender, age, ethnicity, fall, and to be welcomed into a community of poets, many of whom I have worked with, shared poems with and learned from. Having lost ties to my country, Iran, but finding a home in English poetry, often universal in outlook and excitingly porous to other cultures, has been made all the more precious to me by this generous recognition.”
