National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2019
Presented by The Poetry Society 2020
National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2019 The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX poetrysociety.org.uk ISBN: 978-1-911046-22-6 Cover: Cat O’Neil, catoneil.com © The Poetry Society & authors, 2020
National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2019
Judges: Mona Arshi, Helen Mort & Maurice Riordan
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 over 85 countries who submitted more than 16,500 poems to the 2019 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 events including the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July. Winning and commended poems are published on The Poetry Society’s website, poetrysociety.org.uk The Poetry Society especially wishes to thank our 2019 competition judges Mona Arshi, Helen Mort and Maurice Riordan.
FIRST PRIZE
Susannah Hart
Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy has left me feeling vaguely sick and I think a walk is probably the answer, is often said to be the answer, though I now understand physical intervention must not be undertaken lightly and the appropriate training must be given because the policy is designed to prevent the impairment of health or development even though it has had the opposite effect on me as currently I feel impaired, uneven, unequal to the task of being real, such that it occurs to me that humankind seems to be trying to find ever more ingenious ways to make the bearing of reality more difficult, else how could anyone have thought of all the horrible things that someone somewhere is always doing to someone else, whose vulnerabilities may or may not include neglect, homelessness, mental health issues, bereavement, previous abuse, but then again humankind has form for this kind of thing as medieval warfare I seem to recall was rather brutal and the skeletons exhumed from mass battle graves show hacking injuries, great gouges in the bones from mace and broadsword, and to be fair that documentary on Vietnam that we’re watching on Catch Up may not go heavy on the suffering caused by female genital mutilation or child sexual exploitation but it’s pretty full on when it comes to napalm and furthermore the museum in Hiroshima strongly implied that the devil has always had his hands full with party tricks and pranks which leads me to ask myself whether any good will come of all this knowledge as in point of fact the policy suggests that the imagery should only be viewed on a strictly necessary and need to know basis and certainly I did not need to know about the buttons burned into the skin or the flesh hanging off the wrists but now I do know and I cannot cease to know while perhaps more usefully I also know what to do if a child
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discloses and I recognise that this takes a lot of courage and that I cannot stop paying attention because beforehand the child may show signs of anger, sadness, bruising, silence, they may wear long sleeves at inappropriate times, their lives may be particularly vulnerable, more transient, chaotic and unsupported than lives in general, and they may feel guilty, scared and as if they have lost all trust in adults and indeed when you think about it who could blame them.
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SECOND PRIZE
Ann Pelletier-Topping
Granddaughter Moves In The grandma’s purple leg is full of flesheating-maggot holes. Each morning she hammers her hip into gear, limps past the old gas furnace and makes breakfast. After the dishes are tidied away, she sits on her chair and chains her leg to it. All day long she looks out the window while her cuttings in old jars look vibrant and grow roots, on the sill. The purple flesh she got by falling off a ladder, not off a chair, as some rumoured, broke her hip as she hammered on a curtain pole while good-for-nothing Grandad ate dishes of peanuts in the corner tavern and gassed about imagined war wounds instead of buying gas as promised. But the grandfather never looks unshaven and though he won’t help with the dishes, he’ll bounce the grandchild on his knees, making the flesh around his neck wobble a bit. By teatime he’s hammered on London Dry and falls asleep on a chair, bless him. He doesn’t like being tied to his chair and usually disappears off behind the town’s gas works for most of the week, before the grandma hammers out his tedious list of chores. What he looks for, rumour has it, are the sinful pleasures of the flesh, but who could blame him with a wife who dishes
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out abuse at him, worse than the priest dishes out his penance. The granddaughter, on her plastic chair, undresses her doll and doodles on its pink flesh, You bad baby, you only good for the gas chamber. She throws it behind the furnace and looks at the grandmother. Picking up her doll, she hammers its head on the floor. You hurt? Won’t hammer you no more. She puts pretend dishes on the table for tea, feeds her baby. Look, Grandad coming up the stairs. He sits on the chair to take off his rubber galoshes. Where’s the gas! says the grandmother, wanting her pound of flesh. You useless piece of flesh, she lays into him like a hammer then the gas runs out with a pshhh. Cakes? says the child, dishing them out, him on the chair, her giving him the look.
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THIRD PRIZE
Natalie Linh Bolderston
Middle Name with Diacritics Linh hồn [soul] 1. A voice / tapping / from inside the skin 2. Quan Âm / the goddess of compassion / at the end of her ninth life / having shed the last stinging layer / of flesh 3. A temple full / of starving yellow birds 4. Ancestors / who stitch your prayers into houses / with the floors missing 5. The name of four teenage girls / in my mother’s refugee camp 6. The part of me / often left out or misspelled / that moves quietly through the world Lính [soldier] 1. Two sisters / who delivered a village from the throat / of a tiger / the Red River’s champions / anointed as queens 2. A woman / their descendant / two hundred years later / who carried girls from the betrayal of moonlight / searched a field / for the skinless face / of someone she loved 3. Frenchmen / who guarded Bà Ngoa·i’s school gates / when she was a girl / she cycled right up / in white áo dài / offered paper flowers / she had never heard / a foreign accent before 4. The ringing / in the ears / after a grenade / shreds open the morning 5. The rising tone of flesh / heavy with napalm 6. A man / who searches a crater / he made earlier / who returns to Huế many years later / touches reconstructions / of all he destroyed ~ ? linh Ban [bravery]
1. A monk / whose heart will not burn / no matter the heat / whose words / tugged his spirit from his body / to watch over / the spectacle of suffering / the way a flower / opens to drought 2. A woman / hiding bribes in the walls / stops the shake of her hands / when she lies
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3. A girl / in her parents’ deserted house in Ba·c Liêu / selling hats / waiting for word from her mother / hiding / from an older man / who has been watching her grow 4. A mother / bargaining / for broken rice / cubes of pork / cigarettes / ginger to help stomach her twelfth child / still inside her 5. A man / who lies on a table / on a boat / no anaesthetic / black powder medicine / the smell of burning 6. A girl again / in a camp / her fingers / on her sister’s wrist through the night Ra li·nh [to command] 1. A girl / who stops eating / asks her body to follow her / into silence 2. Bullets / at a teenage boy’s heels / as he runs / from his uncle’s seized field 3. Scripture / by unholy men / ordering Ông Ngoa·i to tame a jungle / into a home 4. Heirlooms surrendered / for silence / birthdates / sea / exile 5. Names given up / because home did not rest easily / on unyielding tongues 6. My mother’s medicated bloodstream / that tells her / her pain does not exist / that her bones / have not yet lived through / all they can endure
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COMMENDED
Joe Dunthorne
Due to a series of ill judgements on my part my son lies asleep in a tin sandwich box inside the knapsack of a man deep within the Cayuga salt mine’s corridor of teeth where there’s the sound of what in my son’s dreams he takes to be our neighbour’s cough but means, in fact, they’re blasting new seams in the caverns beneath the man who now, ravenous, peels the misted clingfilm and only slightly surprised to find the naked child – limbs folded, neat as travel cutlery – thinks whoever let their son be wrapped up for a stranger’s lunch does not deserve to keep him, crunching down on the still-soft bones and it is only as I hear the man’s involuntary noises of pleasure rising from far beneath the earth that I remember no, my son is in the back seat and that is just the sound of him snoring, head loose on his neck, terribly alive, as the wheels of the car on the salted tarmac deliver us both to soft play.
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COMMENDED
Charlotte Knight
MOONDADDY Today the doctor asked if I was planning on keeping it Right now it is a little grainy moon distorted by dark waves that I know with the slightest change of tide might pull us closer together Being in love is like drowning in space oh baby
you gaslight me so hard
The days when you pretend we do not know each other fill me with all this understanding for foxes how they scream in the night for want of sex Imagine your reaction to something concrete proof of a world in which we have both existed momentarily even if it is just this this malformed pearl
ready to be crushed
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COMMENDED
Rosie Shepperd
Letter from Kermanshah If you do not feed yourself, your hunger will eat you; remember to attend and your food will make itself so that you can stand back and watch how it wishes to make you. There is nothing that cannot be cured with cardamom. It will listen to the way you imagine and it will taste of its own expression of you. Not much can be learned without limes. If you become afraid, cook Sohān-e-Asali and while you taste the scent of rose water, close your eyes to imagine Madar Borzog, shelling pistachios and pouring warm honey into butter. As a child, you were always inventing; my smoked red cinnamon came from inside that lovely wondering head and when I take a warm pinch of it, I think of you and how you needed to explore. There will be times when you feel alone without being alone and for this I send you a memory of Khoresht-e-mast. Before you cook it, search out two blood oranges and remember to run your nail down the skin – this oil should stay in your hand for a night and a day. Otherwise this orange, it is just an orange. And that reminds me to remind you about strangers. Strangers are only made and a place is only made strange. Before we imagine a welcome, we must imagine ourselves welcome. The way to welcome a lamb is to soak him in whey with saffron and pink sugar. He will become familiar with these things and they with him. And this brings me to Mokhallafât. What is a friendship if small gestures go unnoticed? I have heard the people where you are; they lean, they lean to reach their food. This is a mystery as those thin arms and sharp elbows will hide the pattern of the Sofreh. Do they really separate Naahaar va Sham, and with what? How can a meal unify and become part of us if we separate it and ourselves? Parsley is not sweet mint and neither is wild thyme
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but they are not apart; they touch and they talk when mixed to form something new – Sabzi Kordan – sprinkled bitter green on fresh strained Panir as it waits; white and soaking its patience in a fine fresh muslin.
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COMMENDED
Cheryl Moskowitz
Hotel Grief Inside was like a tunnel – a long one at that – the whole stretch of summer advanced it. We were caught in its shadows while outside the sun blazed, Mediterranean. A vacation nonetheless, this is where we wanted to be. Nowhere else existed. We made the hospital our villa, languished in the day room on blue plastic chairs, treated ourselves to machine coffee and vanilla ice cream in a tub from the crêpe place across the road. We knew we were special guests – everything clung with a kind of specialness and we wore the same clothes for days, smelling of antiseptic just as if we’d done nothing but lounge by the pool doused in sunscreen and insect repellent. No flies in here, and like the best holidays day merged into night and night into day while the heat wrapped us in its stillness and there was nothing to do but be together. There was a kind of bliss in her dying, should I be ashamed of saying that? The closeness that awfulness brings. And I will miss that huddling, that being together. The shrinking of the world outside to a single fold-out bed at the foot of hers where she lay tucked under a flat cotton sheet crisp as an autumn morning.
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The nurses danced their silent floor show and the buzzing of the nebuliser took the place of midnight chirping crickets and all too soon it was over. Even for the living the end of summer is a kind of death so ours was a double mourning and now I find I’m missing the hum of 2am voices, the chattering of night staff, the rattle of trolleys promising comfort like room service in faraway hotels. I could stay here again if I had to.
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COMMENDED
Gerald Smith
Where Dedushka Comes From From the bird’s head of Azerbaijan to feathered Caucasian mountains. From October 1917. From the years that followed. From the oil fields your father owned. From those fields he lost. From desert and steppe. From the place where fire jumps out of rocks. From a country which has not been a country for a very long time. From the Black Sea’s sand to Monaco’s diamond beaches, from black stones among snow dunes to a rich fertile soil. From a wagon carrying your family except your father and you to a villa and a chauffeur. From black to blue. From White to cleaner White to White who had to hide. Not from Red. Never from Red. Running from Red. This has always been a retreat, hasn’t it? You, a man expelled by a coup. Man always running, man always afraid. Bug-eyed man, taller man, man appears a bear, tall laughing man, never sad man, never shown sad man, keep on walking man past the casino on the holiday and past la Côte d’Azur, past his mother with nostalgic gaze, his sisters with men of the new country, not the old, past the witches’ fingers by sea foam. This game of cache-cache never gets old; it’s always been so old. From the East to the Midi, to the West? From Paris, from Amsterdam. From your family, is that what you ran from? From the constant letters, from the gatherings of those too close. From Sister Katcha. From your father’s last letter? From scoldings grandmother gave you. From your father’s cough. From the blood in his hand. From the tartar tent he stayed in as you were told to play outside in the snow. From Sacha and Rosita and eyes looking up and mouths always moving. From your daughter’s stare, her tongue trying to touch upon the sayings only you knew. Where to go? Where to run and where to hide?
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Old man, Father Time speaking French with a Slavic accent, they weren’t the ones who followed you. It was just me, chasing you through the tunnels of my mother’s stories and this labyrinth of letters left. I cannot pin you, bear of a man. I cannot make you into anyone. You are not a language nor a country. you, a citizen of no land, am I too from nowhere? You’re nothing I know, every secret I want to hear retold and retold until it dries out like a bear’s bones.
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COMMENDED
Louisa Adjoa Parker
Kindness Instead of you dying, why don’t we go for that walk, in the woods I couldn’t find in spite of your neat, hand-written directions. You’ll pick me up, I’ll climb into your car, you’ll say Sorry it’s a mess, although it will be clean. When we arrive, I’ll say It’s so pretty here, and we’ll laugh at how many months ago we planned this. Instead of spending Sundays at the shop – where we’d talk in the back room, littered with clothes, and you’d patiently steam dresses, while eighties songs played on the radio, we’ll walk and talk amongst the trees, breathe in cool, clean air. You’ll get to see the leaves fall, the days grow short and cold. Perhaps you’ll pause, take off your hat, and your hair – longer now – won’t spring up like your curls did when it grew back after chemo, but will fall into place. We’ll sit by the lake, watch shoals of fish move through a patch of sunlit water, stare at water lilies, orange leaves twisting in the air, and we’ll talk
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about our children like we always did, and we won’t have slipped out of touch, and the cancer won’t have crept back and caught you by surprise, and I won’t keep remembering how kindness spilled from you like oil, because you’ll still be here, and on the way home we’ll wander into an ancient, honey-coloured church, and later, when I look for you in town, I’ll see you, sitting outside Costa sipping tea, with the sister who looks so much like you and the son who’s always needed you, whippet sleeping at your feet, and you’ll lift your hand and smile.
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COMMENDED
Mark Pajak
Reset She chafes a flame from the lighter, listens to its gush of butane. This thirteen-year-old, hunkered down behind the PE hut. For a full minute she watches the raw egg-white heat quiver round its yolk. Then she unthumbs and the flame slims out. She tugs back her sleeve on a scar, a small pink socket in her forearm. She holds her breath and plugs in the hot lighter. Her lips clench white, eyes into walnuts, the metal cap fizzing into skin and fat and this is how she deletes herself. Her mind’s blank page a kind of snow blindness. Then, all her muscles go slack. She opens her eyes for what feels like the first time. Lets out the breath taken in by someone else.
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Judges, Winners & Commendations 2019
JUDGES
Mona Arshi Mona Arshi was born in West London where she still lives. She worked as a human rights lawyer for a decade before she started writing poetry. Her debut collection Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press 2015), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection Dear Big Gods was published by Pavilion Poetry in 2019. Photo: Svetlana Cemenko.
Helen Mort Helen Mort has published two collections with Chatto & Windus, Division Street (2013) and No Map Could Show Them (2016). Her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Prize and she won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize in 2014. Her first novel Black Car Burning was published by Chatto in 2019. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Maurice Riordan Maurice Riordan’s most recent collection of poems is The Water Stealer (Faber, 2013). Among his previous collections are The Holy Land (2007), Floods (2000) and A Word from the Loki (1995). He edited The Finest Music (Faber, 2014), an anthology of early Irish poetry in translation. He is a former editor of The Poetry Review and of Poetry London. Currently he teaches at Faber Academy and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. Photo: Derek Adams.
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WINNERS
Susannah Hart, First Prize Susannah Hart’s poems have been widely published in magazines and online, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The North, The Rialto and Poetry London. She has won several prizes for her work and her debut collection Out of True won the Live Canon First Collection Prize in 2018. 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.
Ann Pelletier-Topping, Second Prize Ann Pelletier-Topping was born in Montreal, Canada, and has lived in the UK since 1989. She has been writing since 2012 but her interest in poetry began in 2015 while doing a Creative Writing module at the Open University. Writing and reading poetry have since become a necessity and a little haven of happiness. In 2018, two of her poems were published in Moor Poets’ fourth anthology. She belongs to a Poetry Seminar Group led by Greta Stoddart of the Poetry School. When she’s not writing, she teaches French in Totnes. Photo: Sophie Baxter.
Natalie Linh Bolderston, Third Prize Natalie Linh Bolderston is a Vietnamese-ChineseBritish poet from Stoke-on-Trent, now living in Greater London. Her work has been featured in The Poetry Review, Magma, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere. She received the silver Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2018, and was a runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition in 2019. She is a member of the 2019–20 Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Her pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts (2019), is published by V. Press.
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COMMENDATIONS
Louisa Adjoa Parker Louisa Adjoa Parker is a poet and writer of EnglishGhanaian heritage. Her latest poetry collection, How to wear a skin (2019), was published by Indigo Dreams, and her first collection and pamphlet were published by Cinnamon Press. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has twice been shortlisted in the Bridport Prize, and highly commended in the Forward Prize. Louisa’s short story collection, Stay here with me, will be published by Colenso Books in 2020. She is currently writing a coastal memoir, to be published by Little Toller Books in 2020/21. Photo: Robert Golden.
Joe Dunthorne Joe Dunthorne was born and grew up in Swansea. His first novel, Submarine (2011), won the Curtis Brown Award and was translated into twenty languages. His second, Wild Abandon (2012), won the Encore Prize. His latest is The Adulterants (2018). His first collection of poems, O Positive, was published last year by Faber & Faber. He lives in London. Photo: Tom Medwell.
Charlotte Knight Charlotte Knight is a British-Ukrainian poet. She is currently studying an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She also works in an inbound call centre where she writes poems between calls. Her poetry is concerned with grief, pregnancy, goats and the moon. Her work has previously been featured in Magma and the Goldfish anthology.
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Cheryl Moskowitz US-born Cheryl Moskowitz studied Psychology at Sussex University, and started out as an actor/playwright, and performance poet with the radical 1980s poetry collective Angels of Fire. She has published in The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma, and The Manhattan Review amongst others; won prizes in the Bridport, Troubadour, Kent & Sussex and Hippocrates poetry competitions; and was a 2018 Moth Poetry Prize finalist. She has two poetry collections: The Girl is Smiling (Circle Time Press, 2012) and one for children. With composer Alastair Gavin she runs the All Saints Sessions, an innovative poetry and electronics performance series in North London.
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, a UNESCO international writing residency and was placed first in The Bridport Prize. His pamphlet, Spitting Distance (2016), was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as a Laureate’s Choice and is published with smith|doorstop. He was previously commended in the National Poetry Competition in 2014 and was the 2018 winner of the Peggy Poole Award. Photo: Robert Peet.
Rosie Shepperd Rosie Shepperd’s That so-easy thing (2012) was a Poetry Business prizewinner. Her collection is The Man at the Corner Table (Seren, 2015) and she is writing her doctorate (Goldsmiths) to identify a way to understand a poem/reading as a paradigm of the creative process of the poet/reader. She was a finalist for the Cardiff, Forward, Ledbury, Liverpool, Manchester and Moth prizes and is a chef at the charity, FoodCycle, that cooks 2,000 meals a week for guests facing various challenges.
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COMMENDATIONS
Gerald Smith Gerald Smith likes three things: big cities, bikes and stories about dead relatives. His work has been published by Glass Mountain and Z Publishing, and in 2017 he won the University of Houston Provost Prize for his poem ‘Anemoia’. Currently, he is writing a collection of poetry entitled Micha Anemoia Bear, about trying to get to know a grandfather he never knew. He lives in Scotland, although he often travels to France and to his home state of Texas. Photo: Matthew Francis.
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National Poetry Competition winners 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’ 1999 Simon Rae ‘Believed’ 1998 Caroline Carver ‘horse underwater’ 1997 Neil Rollinson ‘Constellations’ 1996 Ruth Padel ‘Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire’ 1995 James Harpur ‘The Frame of Furnace Light’ 1994 David Hart ‘The Silkies’ 1993 Sam Gardiner ‘Protestant Windows’ 1992 Stephen Knight ‘The Mermaid Tank’ 1991 Jo Shapcott ‘Phrase Book’ 1991 John Levett ‘A Shrunken Head’ 1990 Nicky Rice ‘Room Service’ 1989 William Scammell ‘A World Elsewhere’ 1988 Martin Reed ‘The Widow’s Dream’
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NATIONAL POETRY COMPETITION WINNERS
1987 Ian Duhig 1986 Carole Satyamurti 1985 Jo Shapcott 1984 Tony Curtis 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978
Carol Ann Duffy Philip Gross James Berry Tony Harrison Medbh McGuckian Michael Hulse
‘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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The Peggy Poole Award Running alongside the National Poetry Competition, the Peggy Poole Award is a new talent development scheme for poets based in the North West of England. The Award is in memory of the poet and broadcaster Peggy Poole. Poet Malika Booker is the mentor for the 2019 winner of the Award.
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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 2020 competition launches in May, closing date 31 October 2020. For more information and to sign up to receive updates, visit poetrysociety.org.uk/npc
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