The news that Shetland-based poet Jen Hadfield has won the TS Eliot Prize For Poetry 2008, really comes as no surprise to those of us in the Highlands and Islands – and especially those in Shetland – who know Jen and her work.

The news has, of course, been greeted with the same degree of absurd ‘news from nowhere’ and ‘unknown’ writer type comment that is the lazy, off-pat jargon of the Anglo-centric media, who display their lack of knowledge of localities (and the writers they are home to) beyond a taxi ride from their shiny urban offices in such bemused, dislocated descriptions.

There is also a suggestion in the news coverage of the award that Jen is somehow a ‘newcomer’ to poetry, prompting the question to such critics – ‘where have you been?’ This especially strange given that had the Telegraph’s reporter read Will Self’s page-lead comment and review of the new book by D S Murray, he or she would be very well aware of the strength of writing in Shetland and its growing prominence in UK letters. And let’s face it, given the prominence of Shetland in UK writing just now, any national newspaper Books Editor (if there are any left by the time you read this) could do a lot worse than open an office in Lerwick.

The fact is that Shetland is one of the UK’s great hotspots for writing. This is part due to the work of Shetland Arts (and previously Shetland Arts Trust) and its literature development worker Donald Anderson, and previously Alex Clunness, in fostering the kind of support that helps writers to develop their work and produce their best, and partly due to a more amorphous sense of creativity, activity, participation that has many different roots and causes. I believe that the Scottish islands make a good home for any writer because of the close proximity of community, history, language(s) and environment that is key to so much island culture – surely the very stuff of literature? And yes this is an unapologetic Come-All-Ye to writers everywhere.

Shetland Arts meantime have developed a canny knack of appointing writers in residence who subsequently claim creative asylum, eschewing the chance to leave the island and who then stay on for weeks, months and in the case of Jen Hadfield, for years!

Apart from Jen, in recent times, Shetland has managed to poach two of the Isle of Lewis’s finest writers in novelist and poet Kevin MacNeil (also one-time writer in residence) and poet, historian and general man of letters, Donald S Murray (referred to above). I know how these things can happen, being a Londoner who left the charms of Essex behind me to settle in Lewis and write a novel. It was touching to read in The Telegraph report today that Jen was born in a more ‘homely’ Cheshire. Is Shetland really less homely than Cheshire?

Of course, Shetland has also exported some fine literary talent in recent years in the form of Robert Alan Jamieson and Christine De Luca, both of whom remain first-rate ambassadors for Shetland.

If Jen Hadfield can be referred to as an ‘unknown’ or a ‘newcomer’ to poetry, then Donald S Murray, originally from Ness on the Isle of Lewis who moved to Shetland a few years back via a spell on Uist, is one of the great undiscovereds (by London literary editors) of UK literature. 100% poet, 100% historian, observer and commentator, 100% islander, 100% his own man – yes he is 400% a writer – and his recent ‘The Guga Hunters’ (Birlinn), a history of the Gannet hunters of Lewis, combines all of his writerly skills in a tome that superbly blends myth, history and his own unique poetics. If the Birlinn book is the body, then his other recent book on the Guga, a collection of poems (published by An Lanntair) that sadly did not attract the reviewers to the same degree, is the soul. What is plain is that Will Self, who reviewed The Guga Hunters so prominently, was not thrown a copy of the book by the editor from atop a pile of hopeful unsolicited submissions and asked to see what he made of it. The review came from Self himself, from within his own sphere of interest and knowledge, and if Self was not such a similar head-strong wanderer as DS Murray, I wager the review would never have happened. The review is all the better for it, of course, but it also serves in its difference, to underline the anchored, myopic stare that emanates from the pages of so many august reviewing titles.

But in truth, I digress. The real point of this blog is to big-up the importance of poetry to the development of all writing. If Jen’s work shows us anything, it is the value of precision and control in writing, of focus, purpose and efficiency of statement, and it is very difficult to imagine an area of creative writing in which that is not a valuable asset to posses as a writer.

Click here to read more about Jen Hadfield being awarded the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry.