Oceans of writing talent on display at the 'poetry Oscars'

A gay Vietnam-born writer who spent a year in a refugee camp before moving to the US at two years old has won England's most important prize for new poets.

Ocean Vuong, 28, received a £5,000 (about R90,000) award for his book Night Sky With Exit Wounds at the Forward Prizes, the annual awards dubbed the ''poetry Oscars".

Vuong was awarded the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, an accolade previously won by writers including Simon Armitage and Don Paterson.

Andrew Marr, head of the judging panel, praised the Vietnamese-American as ''a truly remarkable new voice".

He said: ''This exciting poet navigates different terrains, from personal traumas to history and mythology, with great skill and imagination. Formally daring, and rich in images, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is an incredibly accomplished first collection by an extraordinary talent."

Irish poet Sinead Morrissey won the £10,000 (about R180,000) prize for Best Collection for her sixth book, On Balance, a collection which builds on her talent for depicting well-known historical events from an unexpected vantage-point.

The book includes poems about the launch of the Titanic, the Beatles' visit to Nottingham, and the bones of Napoleon's horse - a ''portal, time machine, skeleton key to what cannot be imagined".

The £1,000 (about R18,000) award for Best Single Poem went to Ian Patterson for The Plenty of Nothing, a dense, moving elegy for his wife, the novelist Jenny Diski, who died last year. - The Daily Telegraph