Alice Oswald elected Oxford Professor of Poetry

This is very good news, and overdue, because Oswald would have been an excellent candidate already the last time round (but maybe she wasn’t ready at the time for more responsibility), and also, of course, because she will be the first woman elected to this position in the 300 years of its existence. I have just finished rereading Seamus Heaney’s Oxford lectures in The Redress of Poetry; I’m looking forward to reading, possibly hearing as podcasts each of Oswald’s 12 lectures, and eventually having them in book form. And to reading and rereading her poems. She is a funny, moving, original poet—intelligent in every sense of the word.