A series of poems by the former poet laureate, Andrew Motion, based on interviews with soldiers in Afghanistan, has been included on the shortlist for the Ted Hughes award, for new poetry presented in the UK during 2014. Also on the shortlist are Patience Agbabi for Telling Tales; Imtiaz Dharker for Over the Moon; Carrie Etter for Imagined Sons; and Alice Oswald for Tithonus.

Coming Home is a series of poems that Motion wrote about the last (or almost the last) British soldiers to leave Afghanistan. He spent time at the British army camp in Bad Fallingbostel, in northern Germany, interviewing soldiers, then wrote poems based on transcripts of the conversations they shared - and, in one further case, with the London-based mother of a British soldier who had been killed in the fighting. Coming Home was originally aired on Radio 4, and produced by Melissa Fitzgerald.

In Telling Tales Patience Agbabi presents a 21st-century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's, in her own poetic style. The themes of Over the Moon by Imtiaz Dharker, the most recent recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons interweaves two kinds of poems to produce a deepening sense of a birthmother’s consciousness.

Tithonus is a poetry piece by Alice Oswald that was commissioned by Southbank Centre and staged there, in London, on midsummer’s nigh, starting in complete darkness and through the whole 46 minutes of midsummer dawn, in real-time, on 21 June 2014. Oswald wrote much of the work during the actual breaking of dawn through spring to midsummer in 2014, and collaborated with nykelharpa player Griselda Sanderson who produced accompanying, haunting, sounds for the performance. You can read a review of the piece by Write Out Loud's Frances Spurrier here.

The three judges are Julia Copus, Kei Miller and Grayson Perry.  The final winner will be announced on 2 April at an awards ceremony in London, alongside the winner of the 2014 National Poetry Competition. Julia Copus said: “We were looking, above all, for work that surprised and moved us; work that was innovative, but not for innovation’s sake; work that was vital and relevant enough to connect with a wide readership and that took account of the world around it. In some cases, the crucial element of surprise arose from the spark that flies when two or more artists work together; in others, from the poet’s own imaginative resources. Our shortlist of five reflects that divergence of approach.” More details