Andrew Marr announced as chair of 2017 Forward Prizes Poetry jury
The journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr is to chair the jury of the 2017 Forward Prizes for Poetry, which will be awarded at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 September 2017. Along with Chris Riddell, Ian Duhig, Mona Arshi and Sandeep Parmar, Marr will be choosing three of Britain’s flourishing poets for the prestigious awards for Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Single Poem.
““After a quarter of a century, the Forward Prizes for Poetry have established themselves as central to the literary landscape of modern Britain - a benevolent act of imagination which has paid off richly – and I am thrilled to be chairing the 2017 awards.
Of all the arts, poetry is the one at which the British have traditionally excelled most. Across these isles, we are living through a period particularly rich in poetry-making. Barely a week goes past when I’m not introduced to a poet or a poem which makes me see the world a little differently and with all the political turbulence around, I can’t wait to get stuck in to some more rigorous reading.
With my fellow jurors - the artist Chris Riddell, the scholar Sandeep Parmar and the poets Mona Arshi and Ian Duhig - we will be looking for newly published poems that offer a vital counterbalance to the crude slogans, sound bites and tired metaphors of public life, poems that rub the dull tarnish from our language and make it new.” ”
The judges will also be nominating poems to feature in the 26th annual Forward Book of Poetry, which will be published on the eve of the prizes in September 2017. For more information, visit the Forward Arts Foundation website.
