National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2020
Presented by The Poetry Society 2021
National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2020 The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX poetrysociety.org.uk ISBN: 978-1-911046-29-5 Cover: Arna Miller, arnamiller.com © The Poetry Society & authors, 2021
National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2020
Judges: Neil Astley, Jonathan Edwards & Karen McCarthy Woolf
“It’s an outrageous honour to have [my] poem recognised by the judges and perhaps the most exciting thing for me is the plain old fundamental feeling of being understood.” – Stephen Sexton, First Prize Winner, National Poetry Competition, 2016
The Poetry Society The Poetry Society is the UK’s leading voice for poets and poetry. Founded in 1909 to promote “a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry”, the Society is one of the most dynamic arts organisations, representing poetry nationally and internationally. With innovative education and commissioning programmes, and a packed calendar of performances, readings and competitions, The Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. To become part of our poetry community, visit poetrysociety.org.uk
The National Poetry Competition Established in 1978, The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition is one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious poetry competitions. The Poetry Society would like to thank the writers from 95 countries who submitted more than 18,000 poems to the 2020 contest. For many poets, whether established or emerging, the prize has proved an important career milestone. Distinguished winners include Carol Ann Duffy, Tony Harrison, Ruth Padel, Philip Gross and Jo Shapcott. Poems are judged anonymously and the top three winners are published in The Poetry Review, one of the world’s leading poetry magazines. Winners are invited to participate in Poetry Society events and commissions. Winning and commended poems are published on The Poetry Society’s website, poetrysociety.org.uk The Poetry Society especially wishes to thank our 2020 competition judges: Neil Astley, Jonathan Edwards and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
FIRST PRIZE
Marvin Thompson
The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galatians 5:22) Dusk reddened a Dual Heritage neck, hands and a moustache – its ends curled with wax. Jason Lee? I stood below his dreadlocks in woodland and reached up to touch his feet. A whirring fan greeted my waking eyes, the house sleepy. I’d dreamt both Dali’s Christ and someone hanged. “... a pineapple on his head...” sang football fans and a comedian blacked up as Jason Lee, mocking Rastas. Did Jason beg Jah: “Please keep this from my kids.” Should I tell mine I filled my lungs with ’90s minstrelsy and sang, a teen lost in lads’ mag England? Who taught me pro-Black talk was contraband? The me who cwtched Dad whilst watching Spike Lees was shoved down basement stairs, feet tied to hands. Embarrassed, should I play my kids Wu-Tang and other rap that set my rebel free? One day, when they walk their kids through woodland will they sing calypsos or ‘Blood of the Lamb’?
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SECOND PRIZE
Iain Twiddy
Fence Landline, long-distance, he tells me about the fall: her coming home through the field by the river, alone, trying to climb over the sheep fence; then the earthy fact, the impact of lying there in the damp grass, the edge-of-winter mud where the sheep step, where the dogs sniff and lift, trying to drag up, broken-hipped, waiting for a passerby not to, when this slips out, like a hushed admission: She’s always had quite poor balance, he says – and it hits me, like thin ice on the lake, not the way she could never ride a bike like the other mums, never put her head underwater, never let us go all that way to try ice-skating in Peterborough; but the fact that he doesn’t say mum. It’s like a glimpse of soft skin under armour, the pink of the tongue behind the mostly closed lips. Not mum, that almost-mumble, like a stone gulped by water, that self-censoring numb, a hmm like a fish glumly swallowing, that repetitive sense that whatever she said was without question / welcomely accepted. She, he says, an open sustain, a free unsmothered, unhooded from motherhood,
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the shh whispering into the secret that this person I lived in, who grew me, has existed for him longer than me, in a way he alone in the world knows. It’s as if I can hear for the first time from under the constructions of marriage and parenthood, from under the rubble of the collapses of body and brain, that She like the most belling appeal, the simplest underpinning principle; as if I’ve been given a close-in glimpse of them in the beginning, stepping out in a sheep field near Corbridge, would it be, the river grinding out of the winter, him helping her over a fence, maybe, her heart not skipping a beat, but leaping.
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THIRD PRIZE
Jack Nicholls
Mum with Sword My mum carries a sword now. You misunderstand me. My mum carries a sword now. My mum has a long, solemn sword swinging behind her when she turns to put the birdseed in the feeder. It is very strange seeing my mum on the settee holding her four-foot bastard sword. I don’t want to talk about the pheasants stalking round the garden singing for grapes. I am still getting used to my mum’s new sword. If I am truthful, I am not ready to be addressing my mum’s sword in a poem. Currently, I am not fit for work, and though I can self-certify for a few poems, soon I will have to have a proper, proper chat with myself. You might wonder what my mum’s new sword looks like, or if there is medieval detailing on the scabbard that a healthy poem would illuminate. Picturing my mum as a lovely woman with cool specs and smart dyed hair, as she is, you might wonder how she bears the weight of the thing. Is she struggling? Are veins cording her biceps? Will her cardie snag and balled tissues come tumbling from the sleeve? You might wonder why, when I’m wholly aware that I must satisfy you of my health, my capacity to perform my duties, when I know that you may terminate my contract if you choose, why I have doodled a sword on a soggy, salty napkin. Friends, I couldn’t stop shouting in the garden. This isn’t easy for you either. Stick to the rules:
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you’re allowed to now pronounce me arsehole out of earshot and I’m allowed to trail long smears of cold cream on the castle walls, and blink like an alien into a tall Gothic mirror, and feel as empty as a plastic yellow birdseed scoop. My mum poured it into my hand and the pheasants came running, and, though wild and wanting other things, they ate, just like she said they would, they fed from the flat of my hand. My mum’s sword was drawn, crudely, and lay amongst the daisies. It looked solemn. It looked long. It looked like a sword. I looked at it and I wrote sword. Friends, take me tightly in both hands and swing.
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COMMENDED
Marie Baléo
Peregrines I have a seat in the abandoned theater / in Beirut. – Mahmoud Darwish It is the landline that must have rung and let me know the war had begun. • We did not know – we were drifting beneath the open sky, notionless, seeing only the wrist that dangles out the window, the threaded jasmine hanging from the rear view mirror. • I picture my parents on a terrace on place Sassine, in sunglasses and starched shirts, sipping wine in parallel motions. In the end, it takes no more than a slight, imperceptible tremor in the fabric of our lives. • On the first night, I dream of two hands, exquisite, incorporeal; too lovely to be attached to something as tenderly ridiculous as the body. The hands are made of blood. They hover before my eyes, and then, just as I recognize that there is beauty in them, and that this itself is quite surprising, they make for my throat. •
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There are no clouds on the day I see the fighter jets appear behind the mountains. I stand alone before the living room windows as they make straight for us; I run to the other end to see them fly on. • This is it, we are leaving. (And it is like running from life itself, and I am reminded of the day of my childhood when, mid-anaphylaxis, I told my father I was leaving). I must tell you, although by now you must know, that the end of the world is not surreal; it is achingly real, disappointingly so, and it goes fast, and what itched and annoyed before will continue to itch and annoy as everything falls apart, only now you exist only to hold everything in place, and fail. • At the border, a human outburst flows into the night’s mouth. A boy refuses to partake, lies down on a wall, head on a sports bag. Silent screens spit out tangerine stills of Beirut, suffocating. Foreheads glisten, cell phones die in their owners’ hands, fingernails reach for bus doors, adults cry, children play, people eat, yawn, scream, I go to sleep upright in a cushioned seat on a third bus, awake an hour later in Syria, where morning has broken, leaving Lebanon to be devoured by the night.
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• Some days, I close my eyes and step out onto the balcony. I yield to the dust under the soles of my feet, to the warmth of the tiles. When I get to the ledge, I bend to gaze at the street, the plastic chair, our forest green car with the striped hood. I look at the towers and the buildings all around, at the sea. I look until my head hurts, until my thoughts burst and spring out of me, drifting to the place above the words, where nothing remains, only light.
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COMMENDED
Vanessa Lampert
Sand On Woolacombe beach my Grandpa builds an MG convertible sports car from sand, in front of the swingboats where I was sick once. My car faces the wind-ruffled sea, roof down under a sky made from torn strips of paper. Grandpa slowly carves the bonnet and makes me a member of the AA. He shapes the wheels and stands back, proud as a car salesman. Other kids are staring. They want to be me. In a few weeks my parents will separate, but now our orange windbreak holds them close together in flowery beach chairs safe from the wind. I sit behind the steering wheel of my new MG. The engine starts first try. I take her out for a spin to Lundy Island to see the puffins and the granite stacks and back, beeping my horn to warn the surfers, who wave. I park her where she was before, facing out to sea. Mum looks up from her book and says it must be time for a 99. I want to jump on my car before we leave, and ruin her so no one else can ruin her, but Grandpa won’t let me. He takes my hand in his, saying don’t look back. Let’s go.
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COMMENDED
Mark Pajak
Trick Inside this disused tool-shed in Hammer Wood slatted walls morse daylight on an earth floor. Here two local boys find a knife, its blade freckled in rust. The older boy picks it up, with its egg whiff of wet metal, and points to his friend to back against the wall for a trick. Then the younger boy’s t-shirt is hustled over his head and rolled into a blindfold. In its blackness, he imagines the moment held like a knife above his friend’s head. His friend who whispers. Don’t. Move. And then there’s a kiss. Lips quickly snipping against his. Silence. He’s aware of his chest, the negative of his t-shirt. He pulls his blindfold. Looks the older boy full in his up-close face. And sees that he’s bleeding, everywhere, under his skin.
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COMMENDED
Susannah Hart
Song of my auntie o auntie of the Kodak Christmases my auntie of the bread and Marmite rosehip syrup teas o auntie who told me at twelve I had childbearing hips auntie whose own hips bore so many children my five red-headed cousins o auntie only sister of your dead brother my little shrinking auntie my tiny auntie with her hair all white my pocket-sized ornamental auntie o auntie of the cheques and the politeness and the Church of England hassocks my auntie who cuts the heads off whitebait who finds New Year’s Eve maudlin my unsentimental auntie my auntie who won’t fly o auntie my auntie my misremembered auntie shared bloodline auntie Carnation milk auntie o auntie whose mother was the same as my father’s practical auntie with looped pads and belts who asked tiny cousins if they’d moved their bowels yet o auntie late married after nursing fecund and dutiful auntie fourteen-year-old auntie choosing her father in court because her brother had chosen their mother o sacrificial auntie o noble auntie o good citizen auntie who never swears who turns the telly off if there’s sex who asks if people really do that my counterpane auntie my candlewick auntie my auntie of the hospital corners o kind friend to his widow taker-in of lost families my knotted handkerchief auntie my knee-high auntie o auntie my auntie
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COMMENDED
Luke Allan
Something to Show for It The best time to take a shower with the lights off is forever. Especially in the very early morning, before the stars have gone in, with the snow on the mountain faintly visible in the darkness through the crack in the window where the steam piles out. You don’t have to leave the house to see the world. Once my mum went into her bedroom and took her own life. You never know what a person is going to do next. It’s enough that you have the light from the extractor hood to wash up in, and the space between the sofa and the coffee table, where your knees go. Even the sound of your downstairs neighbour singing in the afternoon can be enough. It rises through the floorboards in the bedroom and pulls you from the edge of sleep, returns you to your marriage, to the heat trapped under the duvet. The body is, strictly speaking, the only thing we can experience. It’s why I say snow to refer to what is snowing in me. There is no mountain other than the one that has been going on inside you the whole time. It’s enough that you are allowed to lie naked next to her on the bed, in as much darkness as the room can hold, listening to the sound singing makes when it’s over.
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COMMENDED
Daniel Bennett
Clickbait In the forecourt carpark of the out-of-town hypermarket the driver of the four-by-four with a pair of latex bull testicles swinging from the tail-bar may as well accept my ire as an inevitable gift. It is Sunday which means all of us are free, except those of us confined to the steadfast patterns of want. The world teems with things that seek us out with indefatigable urgency: a hack for ear wax, cricket whites for chihuahuas, pension advice from Jason Statham. Dentists hate the local mother who has refined a technique for tooth whitening, but where does this leave our capacity for joy? Snared inside a click farm, in some Siberian tech park, or scraped into the mainframe of our social media loneliness. The moment to have refused this has long since passed, and it’s like a friend of mine once said: we were all born in the wrong time if this is our future. And yet, we slouch on towards the horizon, our longing accumulating in piles, the weight of responsibilities swinging meatily at our backs.
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COMMENDED
Jennifer Hyde
Lifesaving The sun shone brightly while I plucked my parents from the sea. It was good weather for drowning. A gentle breeze fuelled the rolling engine, dragging the bodies that bore me once, dragging them over and below. I got my mother first. Plunging in to pull her out, careful not to crush beneath my care the ribs and hips and walls of my first home. She gasped for air as I birthed her through the brine into the arms of the lifeguard. A strong, healthy girl. Between the rising waves I see the greying face of a frightened boy, already twenty metres out. I didn’t know he couldn’t swim. My father hadn’t liked to say that no one ever really taught him how. I go to him and grasp the thinning arm that carried me upstairs to bed, turn my thighs to face the fading shore and fling all my love and muscle against the blind ocean. But the kicking’s not enough. We cannot breathe between each wave, and it is peaceful not to try. The stars are out and there are candles on the cake, just ten. You both sang. My son, I must get you to shore so that you can be my father once again.
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COMMENDED
We vomit litres of liquid like drunks onto our sandy feet as the lifeguard rushes over with a sandwich we can’t look at. You saved our lives, they say. I thought I owed you mine. I guess we’re even. Still now they smile as they tell the tale to friends of how their daughter plucked them from the sea. We nearly drowned, you know, he says, as his hands bravely strain to raise a trembling cup of tea. There’s not enough dopamine. It destroys the neurons, you see. My mother cheerfully regales the nurses as they strap her into the MRI machine – let me tell you how she saved us! Good thing she had those swimming lessons, eh? She’s a strong, healthy girl. There is no cure. The drugs just slow it down. And so the sun shines brightly while I watch my parents shuffle into a sea from which I cannot save them.
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Judges, Winners & Commendations 2020
JUDGES
Neil Astley Neil Astley is the editor of Bloodaxe Books which he founded in 1978. He has edited many anthologies including the Staying Alive series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020). He has also collaborated with Pamela Robertson-Pearce on Soul Food and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, and has published two collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, as well as two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World. Photo: Pamela Robertson-Pearce.
Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Edwards’ first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, Gen (Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and in 2019 his poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales, and is editor of Poetry Wales.
Karen McCarthy Woolf Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf is a poet, broadcaster and editor of five literary anthologies. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Italian, Dutch and Swedish. Her collection An Aviary of Small Birds (Oxford Poets, 2014) was described as a “pitch-perfect debut” (Guardian); her latest, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017) explores climate crisis, migration, the city and the sacred, and was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. A Complete Works alumna, Karen is a Fulbright All Disciplines Scholar at UCLA where she is Poet-in-Residence for the Promise Institute for Human Rights.
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WINNERS
Marvin Thompson, First Prize Marvin Thompson was born in London to Jamaican parents and now lives in mountainous south Wales. His debut poetry collection, Road Trip (Peepal Tree, 2020), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and selected as one of its five Black Lives Matter Inspiration books. It was also one of forty recommended collections for National Poetry Day 2020. The Guardian described Road Trip as an “invigorating journey through complexities of black British family life”; it was selected by The Telegraph as one of the Poetry Books of the Year for 2020.
Iain Twiddy, Second Prize Iain Twiddy studied literature at university, and lived for several years in northern Japan. His poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Harvard Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. He has written two critical studies, Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2012) and Cancer Poetry (2015).
Jack Nicholls, Third Prize Jack Nicholls is the author of Meat Songs, an Emma Press pamphlet, and his poems have featured in publications such as The Poetry Review, The Tangerine and The Scores. His first play Harsh Noise Wall received a rehearsed reading at the Royal Court Theatre and was longlisted for the 2019 Bruntwood Prize. He comes from Cornwall and lives in Manchester, where he works as a tutor and runs writing workshops for the Portico Library. Photo: Julie Burrow
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COMMENDATIONS
Luke Allan Luke Allan is poetry editor at Partus Press and co-edits the magazines Pain and Oxford Poetry. Originally from Newcastle, he studied literature and creative writing at UEA and Oxford and was formerly managing editor at Carcanet Press and PN Review. Recently he won the Charles Causley International Poetry Competition, and was placed second in the Bridport Poetry Prize and third in the Mick Imlah Poetry Prize.
Marie Baléo Marie Baléo is a French writer, poet, and editor born in 1990, who writes in English, her second language. Her work has appeared in Yemassee, CutBank, Passages North, Redivider, Salamander, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for four Best of the Net awards and her forthcoming chapbook was longlisted for the [PANK] Book Contest. Marie is one of the editors of Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and of the European review Le Grand Continent. She is an alumna of Washington University in St. Louis.
Daniel Bennett Daniel Bennett was born in Shropshire and lives in East London. His poems have been published in numerous places, including Wild Court, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and Structo, and his first collection West South North, North South East was published in 2019 by The High Window Press. He is also the author of a novel, All The Dogs.
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Susannah Hart Susannah’s poems have been widely published in magazines and online, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The North, The Rialto and Poetry London. Her debut collection Out of True won the Live Canon First Collection Prize in 2018 and her poem ‘Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy’ won first prize in the 2019 National Poetry Competition. Susannah is on the board of Magma Poetry. She works as a freelance copywriter and is a long-serving governor at her local primary school. She lives in London with her husband and two sons. Photo: Ged Equi.
Jennifer Hyde Jennifer Hyde came third in a school poetry contest at age nine, and has secretly written poems ever since. She studied languages and literature at the University of Oxford, before working as an actor in Colombia for six years, where she saved her parents from drowning in the sea. This event provided her with the opportunity to write a poem about something other than boys. She is currently writing a collection of poems and three screenplays, most of which are about boys. She resentfully lives in her hometown of Croydon.
Vanessa Lampert Vanessa Lampert is from Wallingford, Oxfordshire, where she works as an acupuncturist. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School and Newcastle University. Vanessa won the Café Writers and Ver Poets prizes in 2020 and was second in The Fish and Oxford Brookes prizes. She writes for and co-edits the online and print magazine The Alchemy Spoon and teaches on the Learn with Leaders programme in India.
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COMMENDATIONS
Mark Pajak Mark Pajak has written for the BBC, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Poetry London, The North, The Rialto and Magma. He has received a Northern Writers’ Award, an Eric Gregory Award, an UNESCO international writing residency and has been awarded first place in the Bridport Poetry Prize. His pamphlet, Spitting Distance (Smith|Doorstop) was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as a Laureate’s Choice. He has previously been commended in the National Poetry Competition in 2014 and 2019. His first collection is forthcoming in 2022.
Visit the National Poetry Competition archive
To enjoy filmed recordings of all this year’s National Poetry Competition winners, and to explore our archive of poems from across the four decades of the competition, visit poetrysociety.org.uk/npc
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National Poetry Competition winners 2020 Marvin Thompson
‘The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galatians 5:22)’ 2019 Susannah Hart ‘Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy’ 2018 Wayne Holloway-Smith ‘The posh mums are boxing in the square’ 2017 Dom Bury ‘The Opened Field’ 2016 Stephen Sexton ‘The Curfew’ 2015 Eric Berlin ‘Night Errand’ 2014 Roger Philip Dennis ‘Corkscrew Hill Photo’ 2013 Linda France ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’ 2012 Patricia McCarthy ‘Clothes that escaped the Great War’ 2011 Allison McVety ‘To the Lighthouse’ 2010 Paul Adrian ‘Robin in Flight’ 2009 Helen Dunmore ‘The Malarkey’ 2008 Christopher James ‘Farewell to the Earth’ 2007 Sinéad Morrissey ‘Through the Square Window’ 2006 Mike Barlow ‘The Third Wife’ 2005 Melanie Drane ‘The Year the Rice-Crop Failed’ 2004 Jon Sait ‘Homeland’ 2003 Colette Bryce ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’ 2002 Julia Copus ‘Breaking the Rule’ 2001 Beatrice Garland ‘undressing’ 2000 Ian Duhig ‘The Lammas Hireling’
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NATIONAL POETRY COMPETITION WINNERS
1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985
Simon Rae Caroline Carver Neil Rollinson Ruth Padel James Harpur David Hart Sam Gardiner Stephen Knight Jo Shapcott John Levett Nicky Rice William Scammell Martin Reed Ian Duhig Carole Satyamurti Jo Shapcott
1984 Tony Curtis 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978
Carol Ann Duffy Philip Gross James Berry Tony Harrison Medbh McGuckian Michael Hulse
‘Believed’ ‘horse underwater’ ‘Constellations’ ‘Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire’ ‘The Frame of Furnace Light’ ‘The Silkies’ ‘Protestant Windows’ ‘The Mermaid Tank’ ‘Phrase Book’ ‘A Shrunken Head’ ‘Room Service’ ‘A World Elsewhere’ ‘The Widow’s Dream’ ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ ‘Between the Lines’ ‘The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City’ ‘The Death of Richard Beattie-Seaman in Belgian Grand Prix, 1939’ ‘Whoever She Was’ ‘The Ice Factory’ ‘Fantasy of an African Boy’ ‘Timer’ ‘The Flitting’ ‘Dole Queue’
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“It’s so liberating for my own confidence to be awarded at such a level. It’s the kind of affirmation I can lean on during the worst days. That, as a poet, is priceless.” – Momtaza Mehri, Third Prize Winner, National Poetry Competition, 2017
The Peggy Poole Award Congratulations to Maria Isakova-Bennett, selected by the poet and editor Vona Groarke as the winner of the Peggy Poole Award 2020. Maria will receive mentoring from Vona as her prize, culminating in a celebratory reading in the North West in spring/summer 2022. Run alongside the National Poetry Competition, the Peggy Poole Award is a talent development scheme for poets based in the North West of England. The past recipients are: Yvonne Reddick, the 2017 winner, who was mentored by Deryn Rees-Jones; Mark Pajak (2018), who was mentored by Michael Symmons Roberts; and Saiqa Khushnood (2019), who was mentored by Malika Booker. The Award is in memory of the poet and broadcaster Peggy Poole.
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PEGGY POOLE AWARD WINNER
Maria Isakova-Bennett Maria Isakova-Bennett received a New North Poets’ Award in 2017 and was poet and Artist-in-Residence at Poetry in Aldeburgh in 2018. She creates and edits the hand-stitched poetry journal, Coast to Coast to Coast. From Liverpool, Maria is also Writer-inResidence for Mersey Care, NHS Trust, works as a tutor for charities across Merseyside and is the author of three pamphlets: ...an ache in each welcoming kiss (Maytree Press, 2019); All of the Spaces (Eyewear, 2018); Caveat, (Poetry Bus, 2015). Photo: Ron Davies.
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The National Poetry Competition is one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious poetry competitions, and an important career milestone for both established and emerging poets. The 2021 competition launches in May, closing date 31 October 2021. For more information and to sign up to receive updates, visit poetrysociety.org.uk/npc
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