A long-distance literary passion for an avant-garde East European musician - in which Google and Myspace played the go-betweens - has earned a Scottish author the accolade of Best Single Poem of 2008. Don Paterson's Love Poem for Natalie “Tusja” Beridze, a paean to a little-known Georgian techno-rocker, secured him his award in the Forward Prize for Poetry.

A collection by Mick Imlah, entitled The Lost Leader, won Best Collection. Paterson's poem combines the arcane language of the techno-geek with the mournful tone of unrequited love over the internet.

“O who is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows ranged like two duelling pistols lightly sweating in the pale light of the TTF screen?” wonders the poet, before he reveals how he has studied almost every detail of Natalie's personal and professional life via his home computer.

“I would have all your plugs-in run in real-time in the blameless zero-latency heaven of the 32-bit floating-point environment, with no buffer-glitch or freeze or dropout or lag,” he promises before signing off, as he sits on a train near Inverkeithing, Fife, listening to Natalie's music for the 234th time in his life.

Beridze, who lives in Tblisi, Georgia, and records on the Max Ernst record label, has built up a sizeable following on the internet, and is compared by some admirers to Björk, another self-consciously arty performer, who broke out of the Icelandic music scene to achieve worldwide fame.

“It was an exercise in writing a poem about music. I'm one of those sad guys who likes post-techno and electronic music. I listen to too much of that stuff, so I thought I would get it out of my system. She's fairly obscure,” said Paterson, who has twice won the T.S. Eliot prize and teaches at St Andrews University.

Beridze was not available for comment yesterday, but the poet's endorsement may help her to greater commercial success, said Frieda Hughes, the chairwoman of the Forward judging panel.

“No poet can possibly have done more to elevate our awareness of a pop star or the benefits of Google as Don Paterson does in Love Poem for Natalie “Tusja” Beridze. This is an impassioned love poem for a distant and not yet very famous, although becoming more so by the minute, idol,” Ms Hughes said.

Imlah's collection was only the second he has published, and came 20 years after the first. Born in Aberdeen and brought up near Glasgow, he has written a poetic history of Scotland, which begins somewhere before

St Columba and moves deep into the late 20th century with a poem to Gordon Brown (the hefty Scottish rugby forward, not the Prime Minister).

Along the way Imlah serves up a series of familiar and not-so-familiar Scottish heroes, including Robert the Bruce, Michael Scot, the medieval scholar, Bonnie Prince Charlie and James Thomson, the alcoholic poet.

Imlah has worked for The Times Literary Supplement for the past 15 years and co-edited The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse.

The poet said he was thrilled by the award, which was “a great boost for morale in my present circumstances” - he has recently had motor neuron disease diagnosed.

Having spent so long on his collection, he promised: “I'll take care to be quicker with the next one.” He added that he would spend the £10,000 prize money on his daughters Iona, 5, and Mary, 2.

Ms Hughes said that the judges had unanimously chosen The Lost Leader, from a selection that included books of verse by Sujata Bhatt, Jane Griffiths, Jen Hadfield, Jamie McKendrick and Catherine Smith.

“If the words of a poem are like the bricks of a building, then Mick has created a variety of structures with such verbal skill and dexterity that we are left with an astonishing city. No word is wasted, nothing is unintentional. Quite brilliant,” Ms Hughes said.

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