Niall Campbell has won the inaugural £20,000 Edwin Morgan poetry award for Scottish poets aged 30 or under, the largest poetry prize in the UK, for his first collection Moontide, published by Bloodaxe. Campbell was announced as winner of the competition at the Edinburgh book festival at the weekend.

Campbell was born in 1984 on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, and now lives in Edinburgh. Moontide was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is also shortlisted for the Forward prize for best first collection. You can read Cato Pedder’s review of Moontide for Write Out Loud earlier this year here.

The award judges were poets Stewart Conn and Jen Hadfield. Conn said: “These poems, with their rich textures, succulent descriptions and seductive cadences reveal a gifted wordsmith… [they] transform the sea-bound Uist they celebrate.” Hadfield said: “In lightly framing the unsaid, some of these poems have a haunted quality: they are cat’s cradles between poet and reader.”

The runner-up is Claire Askew for her unpublished collection ‘This changes things’. She received £1,000 as a shortlisted poet, and a further amount to support her work towards publication. Other short-listed poets, who each received £1,000, were Tom Chivers, Harry Giles, Stewart Sanderson, and Molly Vogel.

Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was the first to hold the post of Scots makar, created in 2004 to recognise the achievement of Scottish poets.