She read Classics at Oxford, before training as a professional gardener. Her poetry is infused with her responses to the natural world. She won a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection for The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile in 1996, and the T.S. Eliot prize for Dart in 2002. In 2009 her volume Weeds and Wild Flowers won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Her most recent book is the highly acclaimed Memorial (Faber, 2011), a work which she describes as an ‘excavation of the Iliad.’ Oswald recited from Memorial at a workshop on contemporary women’s writing and the classical tradition held at the University of Exeter on July 5th 2012 and funded by a British Academy small research grant. This interview between Fiona Cox and Alice Oswald took place at Oswald’s home on Remembrance Sunday, November 11th, 2012.