Firstly, HUGE congratulations on winning the T.S. Eliot prize for Sonnets for Albert. What does this win and recognition for the collection mean for you?

ANTHONY: It’s a tremendous acknowledgement. I’ve been writing for many, many years, writing from what felt at times like the periphery of the canon. This feels very much like the centre. It’s also of course, an endorsement, a sign that I’m writing well and on the right path.

Could you tell us about how Sonnets for Albert draws on your own experience and relationship with your father?

ANTHONY: The poems are attempts to capture something of my father. My dad was a kind of mystery to me, even in the moments when we were together, when we were laughing and having fun. So I’ve tried to remember all i can and put into the book, to almost hold him in place while I negotiate his memory. Its also, at its heart, an exercise in unconditional love. A lot of readers have asked how I could write a book of sonnets about a father who was mostly absent, and really not a great father at all. But I loved my father, and found him charismatic, and this dichotomy is part of what I think gives the book its energy.

Did it change how you felt about your father and even about this remembered experience of childhood?

ANTHONY: I did find out things in the research - when I spoke to my brothers, my aunt and stepmother for instance. They did reveal things I did not know. And this did change my view of him, but not in a negative way. There’s a lot of acceptance at play here. I also found, in the writing process, that memory is not a precise science, that the act of remembering is also a way of remaking the past.