Raymond Antrobus won the £5,000 (about $6,530) Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, which is presented to a "U.K. poet, working in any form, who has made the most exciting contribution to poetry in that year." The Guardian reported that Antrobus, who "fiercely" challenged Ted Hughes's "description of deaf children as 'alert and simple' in a poem in his first collection," received the prize for his debut, The Perseverance.
The judges praised the winner, with Clare Shaw calling the book "universally relevant"; Linton Kwesi Johnson describing it as "the most engaging collection of poems we have read in a long time"; and the Rev. Canon Mark Oakley saying Antrobus was "passionate but speaking from his scars not his wounds--this is a poet you sense very deeply that you can trust."