Lottery makes a-Paulin poetry choice?
TOM PAULIN, POET and Fellow of Hertford College, has been awarded a grant of £75,000 by Nesta, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
The three-year fellowship will allow Paulin to concentrate on his poetry, as he will be giving up his undergraduate teaching. But he will retain his position in the English Faculty, as well as continuing work with his research students. "I'll be as much part of the faculty as I was," he explained, adding: "I'll miss the undergraduate teaching a great deal but that does take up a lot of the week."
Paulin welcomes the flexible nature of the fellowship. "They're not saying 'we want you to have produced something at the end of the grant period," he said. "It's for people at a certain stage in their career to develop whatever they're interested in."
Nesta is a new organisation, set up with Lottery money. 29 people - most of whom are scientists - are to receive awards. Paulin is the only creative writer to have been nominated as a Fellow in the first round of awards.
The generous grant has attracted a degree of controversy in the national press, following the revelation that Poet Laureate Andrew Motion earns only £5,000 a year for his position. But Motion welcomed the news of Paulin's award. "Tom is a fantastically deserving case and I am a great admirer of his work," he said. Paulin recognised that the ample lottery-funded award might attract some criticism. "In a sense I've won the lottery. Isn't it awful, the working class subsidising the middle class? I do feel that kind of guilt. I've never in my life bought a lottery ticket and yet we live in hope." He added "an academic salary is not competitive compared with the rest of the world. I don't think I'm a fat cat having more oil poured over me."
Paulin, who makes regular appearances on BBC2's Late Review, describes the award as "a great honour." He acknowledged that some people might question the award of such a large sum of money to an already established literary figure, but emphasises that some form of grant is necessary for an academic to develop creative work. "I can see the argument [for giving awards to up-and-coming writers] but for those of us who work in institutions, there are endless requests for information, endless complications, endless calls on your time - it's very difficult to find time to write and think."
4th May 2000