Manchester Met's Andrew McMillan among Candidates for Oxford University’s next professor of poetry

Andrew McMillan is senior lecturer in Poetry at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Andrew McMillan, senior lecturer in Poetry at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University is among candidates in the contest for the country’s second most important role in poetry has begun. Voting has opened for Oxford University’s next professor of poetry.

Other nominees include Alice Oswald and Todd Swift.

Candidates are voted into the four-year professorship and must be nominated by at least 50 Oxford graduates. The role involves giving a public lecture every term. It is currently held by newly appointed poet laureatte, Simon Armitage. 

In his statement, Andrew McMillan says: “More than any time in the past two decades, we’re witnessing a new generation of poets step forward and claim space within the prize lists and the editorial boards and the inner rooms of our art form,” McMillan says. “The Oxford professor of poetry feels like a position uniquely suited to this current moment; both future-facing, towards the student body and yet with the weight and prestige of the lineage of predecessors standing behind it as well.”

Find out more here.

Andrew McMillan joined the Manchester Writing School team in September 2017. He was born in South Yorkshire in 1988; his debut collection physical was the first ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers' award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. Most recently physical has been translated into Norwegian.