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Winners of Poetry Business prizes announced

The Poetry Business has announced the Winners of the 2017/18 Book & Pamphlet Competition, judged by Liz Berry and David Constantine.

Rebecca Cullen (Nottingham) for Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings

Ann Gray (Cornwall) for I Wish I Had More Mothers

Christopher North (Alicante, Spain) for The Topiary of Passchendaele

Madeleine Wurzburger (London) for Sleeve Catching Fire at Dawn

These collections will be published by Smith|Doorstop books, an imprint of The Poetry Business, and launched on 22 September at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. This event is not ticketed and everyone is welcome. The winners will each receive a share of £2,000 cash as well as publication in The North magazine.

Poets want to say what it is like now. Taking all the pamphlets together, there was great variety of subject, poetic form and tone of voice.  The scores of poems here demonstrate not just the necessity for poetry but also the life of it, the good it does.
David Constantine, Judge
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Details have also been announced of the Winners of the 2017/18 New Poets Prize, which was judged by Kayo Chingonyi.

Joe Carrick-Varty (Manchester) for Somewhere Far

Tristram Fane Saunders (London) for Woodsong

Emma Jeremy (London) for Let's Just Call It What It Is

Warda Yassin (Sheffield) for Tea with Cardamom

The four winners will receive a year’s mentoring and support from The Poetry Business, publication in The North magazine, and a workshop and reading with Kayo Chingonyi. The first prize winner and a runner up will also be offered a place each on an Arvon residential course of their choice in 2018.

These four winning collections will be published under The New Poets List – an imprint of The Poetry Business – in 2019.

I have awarded prizes to those I find to be assured, illustrative of a particular sense of occasion, and with an overwhelming  sense of the author’s literary personality. I noted, in reading all of the entries, a range of influences on the style of these poems which might illustrate an opening out, in recent years, of poetry’s boundaries.
Kayo Chingonyi, Judge
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