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1961 - 1970
Sean O’Brien is a British poet, critic and playwright. His prizes include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize (1995, 2001 and 2007) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only two poets (the other being John Burnside) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems (The Drowned Book).
He grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived in Newcastle upon Tyne since 1990, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford for 2016-17.
