Associate Professor Shane McCrae’s book Cain Named the Animal (Little Brown, 2022) has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, one of the most influential awards for new poetry in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The winner will be announced on November 28 at Contact, Manchester, and will be awarded £10,000.
“Being shortlisted for the Forward Prizes means I have been given an honor well beyond my deserving, but being shortlisted for the Forward Prizes also means I will have the unspeakable joy of seeing my name listed alongside the names of contemporaries whom I greatly admire, and I will have an excuse to send them fan letters,” McCrae said to the Forward Arts Foundation.
Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world which McCrae has built in other books and which have made his poems so widely praised. The Garden of Eden, God rehearsing the world, and the lost tribe who lives observing how life succumbs over time are essential parts of this collection of poems. “God first thought time itself,” McCrae writes, “was flawed, but time was God’s first mirror.”
In The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson called Shane McCrae “a shrewd composer of American stories.” Other critics have also shared the same enthusiasm towards his poems, pointing to how McCrae “constructs a wild, vivid dreamworld in Cain Named the Animal. “McCrae’s poems possess a self-reflective quality without being burdened by history. [Cain Named the Animal] confirms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time, throwing punches at the English language and its hierarchical traditions,” wrote Kit Fan in The Guardian.
McCrae’s book will compete with other collections such as Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell (Chatto & Windus), Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury Poetry), Kim Moore’s All the Men I never Married and Helen Mort’s The Illustrated Woman (Chatto & Windus). The jury will be composed of celebrated novelist and activist Fatima Bhutto, Chair of Judges, and poets Rishi Dastidar, Alice Hiller, Nadine Aisha Jassat and Stephen Sexton.
2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, founded by British entrepreneur, publisher and philanthropist William Sieghart. This prize has recognized other poets including Simon Armitage, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, Claudia Rankine '93, Jackie Kay and Caleb Femi.
Shane McCrae is the author of The Gilded Auction Block (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), Forgiveness Forgiveness (Factory Hollow Press, 2014), Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), and Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), as well as three poetry chapbooks, and one nonfiction chapbook. His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, African American Review, Gulf Coast, and other anthologies and journals, and he has been awarded the Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize. He received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a JD from Harvard Law School, and an MA in Literary Studies from the University of Iowa. In 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
