AS a heroin addict, Sam Willetts has known the depths of despair.

Now he is enjoying the fruits of success after being shortlisted for two of the most prestigious poetry prizes alongside some of the country’s most famous writers.

The former Magdalen College School pupil, who read English at Wadham College, Oxford, has known homelessness and addiction.

But in a few weeks’ time the son of a North Oxford don could taste glory after being shortlisted for the £30,000 Costa Prize and the 2010 TS Eliot Prize.

Nominees for the Eliot prize, worth £15,000, include Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott.

How Mr Willetts, 48, managed to so completely turn his life around is hinted at in his first collection of poems, New Light for the Old Dark.

Critics have described the poems as chronicles of a flawed world by a man who has been “through fire and come back.” One poem describes him as “living from hit to hit and floor to floor.”

“I know it positioned as a druggy book,” he said. “But I would say that less than 10 per cent of the content is directly about drugs.”

It is also about playing truant to escape his school tormenters and recalls children’s parties in Victorian North Oxford gardens.

His mother Halina, was a Polish Jew, who escaped before the arrival of the Nazis, while his father, Harry, was a fellow of St Anthony’s, and had worked for the Foreign Office in the Moscow Embassy, later translating books by Alexander Solzhenitisyn. The great Russian writer was a visitor to their home.

He describes his childhood as “chaotic” rather than happy, with Magdalen College School a miserable experience for him.

He says: “I was bullied. I used to play hookey all the time. My poor father would go in to plead my case. He used to say, ‘I spend more time at that school, than you do.’ “I was scruffy and I may have come across as a smart alec to some teachers. In the summer I would go to Port Meadow and the Parks, and in the winter the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers. I’m surprised I was never picked up by the police.”

He secured a place at Wadham and completed his degree, despite heavy drinking and taking amphetamines.

He first dabbled in drugs at the age of 11, pinching his mother’s valium and librium. “I was always, from a very early age, fascinated by drugs. I liked their names.

“I dabbled in class A drugs, taking heroin maybe once or twice a year. I didn’t like it. It made me sick. I used to berate people who used needles. It was 20 years before I became an addict.

“It was as if I wanted to find a way to sabotage my life.”

Following the death of his father he became homeless, living in “extreme squalor”.

His poetry career is down to the encouragement of an ex-girlfriend who suggested he enter a competition.

He is now staying in a friend’s flat in London.

If he wins the prize he says he will treat himself to a pair of shoes that do not let in water, and buy a better gravestone for his father in Wolvercote Cemetery.

He added: “I would also like to get a place of my own.

“I hate having to depend on other people. I’m not that thick skinned.”