Tom Paulin, the poet and television pundit, is to be awarded £75,000 of Lottery money in the biggest act of state patronage for poetry since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
The 51-year-old Oxford don will be one of the first recipients of a three-year fellowship from Nesta, the newly created National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, and he is expected to use the time the money will buy him to experiment further with free verse.
Nesta, chaired by Lord Puttnam, the film producer and Labour peer, was created in 1998 to promote talent and ideas across business and academic disciplines. Paulin, who grew up in Belfast and appeared on BBC2's popular arts programme Late Review , is the only creative writer to have been nominated as a fellow in the first round of awards.
News of his fellowship has been welcomed by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, who said: 'This is a very brave move, and a new body such as Nesta has a responsibility to be brave. Tom is a fantastically deserving case, and I am a great admirer of his work.'
Motion receives only £5,000 a year for his role as laureate - along, of course, with a traditional butt of sack which, so far, has not arrived.
'Before me, the traditional payment, since Dryden's time, used to be £100 a year,' he pointed out, 'although in Dryden's time that was quite a lot of money.'
Paulin's latest and sixth book of verse, The Wind Dog, was well-received and did much to re-establish his literary talent in the face of a growing reputation as a pugnacious commentator on the arts. But not everybody was impressed with his work. Guardian reviewer Richard Potts spotted signs of self-indulgence in Paulin's playful attitudes to syntax, punctuation and language. 'At this point in his career, there's every chance he will get away with it,' Potts conceded.
The decision is unlikely to be popular with Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's official spokesman, whom Paulin reviled on the Late Review as a former 'alcoholic pornographer'.
Motion is robust in his defence of Paulin's talent, though. 'He is unusual among modern poets in that he is both lyrically interesting and highly intelligent,' he said.
Paulin's influence has grown since he came to notice with early collections such as Fivemiletown . He is thought to have been crucial to the success of his friend and fellow Northern Irishman Paul Muldoon's bid to become professor of poetry at Oxford University.
Paulin recently failed to obtain funding from the Leverhulme Trust for a writing project on Daniel Defoe, and was beaten in the race for the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry. The prize went to Hugo Williams for Billy's Rain, about an unhappy extra-marital affair.
The endowment fund will be launched next week when the first grants and fellowships will be announced. At its inception two years ago the fund was handed £200 million from National Lottery proceeds on the understanding it would make annual awards from the interest. Grants of at least £10m will be made to scientists, creative people and business innovators.
