WINNERS & COMMENDED POETS ANNOUNCED!!!

We were thrilled with the massive response to this year’s competition theme of PROTEST and to our judge for this year, the wonderful Kim Moore! SO many entries, of such high quality. Kim spent most of January reading ALL the poems (anonymously of course!) and she has selected her first, second and third prize winners, along with 21 commended poems, all of whom will feature in our annual competition anthology (published by sister press, Verve Poetry Press) and appear, should they wish, at our Competition Event at VERVE 2023 where they can meet and be introduced to our audience by Kim!

WE HAVE THOSE RESULT FOR YOU NOW!!!

OUR THREE PRIZE WINNERS ARE …

1st PRIZE – WENDELIN LAW for her poem ‘Ovation’.

Wendelin Law (she/her) is a poet and writer born and raised in Hong Kong’s concrete jungle. This city of monstrous high-rises taught her about freedom and protest. She was shortlisted for Magma Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2022 and was awarded 1st prize of Professor Shirley G.L Lim Poetry Writing Scholarship 2018. Her poetry and review have appeared in Hillfire Anthology, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, PN Review and elsewhere. She holds MScs in Literature & Modernity and Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Feel free to share protest poetry with her on twitter @wendylawwrites!

Kim’s thoughts on the winning poem: ‘In this deeply subversive poem, the poet wields satire as a weapon, exposing the fault lines and lies of dictators and the regimes they build around themselves. This poem seemed rich in references as well – I heard echoes of John Donne in here in the repeated ‘Oh my dictator, my dictator’ which made me think of ‘O my America, my newfound land’ and of course Tina Turner later on: ‘Rivers and oceans are deep, but not as deep as the love of a tyrant.’ I think it is a wonderful and original poem in its own right, but to send an ode that apparently lavishes praise on a tyrannical leader into a competition asking for ‘Protest’ poetry was a wonderfully bold and irreverent move.

3rd PRIZE – CASEY JARRIN for her poem ‘When They Ask For Proof’

Casey Jarrin (she/they) is a poet, artist, educator, survivor who was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport Prize. She’s completing her debut manuscript, The Naked Dinner. 

AND OUR 21 COMMENDED POETS ARE:

Becky Balfourth – Gemma Barnett – Fiona L Bennett – Hannah Burrows – Sujana Crawford – Glyn Edwards – Jack Emsden – Christopher Horton – Perla Kantarjian – Stephen Lightbown – Arji Manuelpillai – Nicholas McGaughey – Steve Pottinger – Julie Runacres – Sue Spiers – Caroline Stancer – Scarlett Ward – Iain Whiteley – Spencer Wood – Ros Woolner – Ruth Yates.

HUGE congratulations to them all! And thankyou to everyone who entered our competition with poems of such high quality! Our PROTEST themed event at VERVE 2023 (Sunday 19th Feb 11:00am – 12:30pm), hosted by Kim, is FREE to attend but tickets must be booked to ensure your place is kept as it is always hugely popular. This event will have BSL interpretation and will be LIVE streamed for those who wish or need to attend remotely. Tickets available NOW! VERVE 2023 Line-Up | Verve Poetry Festival

For our 2020 festival, the theme for our competition was Diversity (what better for a festival with diversity at its heart?). The quality of the entries was sky high and gave judge and event host Andrew McMillan a real problem when it came to selecting his top three and his commended titles.(see the results in full below). We wondered with our theme how celebratory the poems might be, and the feeling was fairly unanimous that while diversity should be celebrated, it wasn’t yet time to ignore the struggles and misunderstandings that often surround diverse approaches to love and life. However these poems also carried a determination to communicate the frustrations as well as the positives of varied approaches to living and ways of being, and the feeling was of a quest to create understanding and tolerance not yet over. There is work to be done! We hope the anthology that contains all the winning poems from the competition will help carry on that fight by helping to communicate diverse stories and approaches to the world.

1st Prize: The Dogs by Eleanor Penny

2nd Prize: Gaylord by Jack Parlett

3rd Prize: How To Wheel by Karl Knights 

Commended Poets:

Isabelle Baafi, Estelle Birdy, Dale Booton, Claire Collison, Jack Cooper, Natalie Crick, Jade Cuttle, Miles Fagge, Samuel Green, Roma Havers, Prerena Kumar, Paul Howarth, Christopher James, Tim Kiely, Zosia Kuczynska, Maria Leonard, Stephanie Papa, Michael Saunderson, Thomas Stewart,, Kat Payne Ware, Hilary Watson, Natalie Whittaker.