In her poem, Smokers for Celibacy, she wrote: "If you want to avoid turning into physical wrecks what you should give up is not smoking but sex", later adding: "We're opting out of one-night stands; we'd rather have a cigarette in our hands./ If it's a choice between two objects of cylindrical shape we go for the one that is seldom if ever guilty of rape."

New Zealander wins Queen's poetry prize
By Sam Leith
(Filed: 25/04/2006)

Fleur Adcock, the New Zealand-born poet, has won one of Britain's top poetry awards. Her collection, Poems 1960-2000, was yesterday named winner of the 2006 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Her name joins a list of previous winners that includes W H Auden, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, as well as her fellow antipodeans, Les Murray and Peter Porter.

The Gold Medal, inaugurated by King George V in 1933, is awarded intermittently for an outstanding book of verse by a British or Commonwealth subject. Miss Adcock is its seventh woman winner.

Born in Papakura, in New Zealand's North Island, in 1934, she has said that she started writing poems at the age of five.

Miss Adcock spent much of her childhood in Britain before moving back to New Zealand in her teens. She came to live in Britain permanently in 1963.

She has produced 10 collections of her poetry, as well as editing anthologies of verse from New Zealand and 20th-century women's poetry. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984, and was awarded the OBE in 1996.

Her writing is admired for its humour, formal control, and a combination of directness and irreverence that speaks to a wide public.

In her poem, Smokers for Celibacy, she wrote: "If you want to avoid turning into physical wrecks what you should give up is not smoking but sex", later adding: "We're opting out of one-night stands; we'd rather have a cigarette in our hands./ If it's a choice between two objects of cylindrical shape we go for the one that is seldom if ever guilty of rape."

"She's popular without in any way dumbing down," said Peter Porter, a friend and the winner of the Queen's Gold Medal in 2002.

"She's very much admired and liked. There's nothing insipid about her. She's quite tough, actually. A very good natural style: never overdoes anything, never gets into inflated writing."

Miss Adcock will be presented with her award by the Queen in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on June 7.

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