Bernadine Evaristo & Joelle Taylor Named Chairs For 2023 Judging Panels As Winners Of 30th Anniversary Forward Poetry Prizes Revealed
Forward Prizes for Poetry
From left to right: Kim Moore, Stephanie Sy-Quia, Nick Laird, Bernadine Evaristo, Joelle Taylor
As the winners of UK’s most coveted prizes for poetry were revealed live from Contact, Manchester in front of a sell-out audience, the Forward Arts Foundation announced Bernardine Evaristo and Joelle Taylor as the chairs of the prizes’ two judging panels for 2023.
The 2023 prizes will include a new category: Best Single Poem - Performed, which will sit alongside the Best Single Poem - Written category. Evaristo will chair the panel judging the collection-length entries, and Taylor will chair the panel focusing on the two single poem prizes. Other judges include Karen McCarthy Woolf and Kate Fox.
‘We are ecstatic to work with such powerhouses as Bernardine Evaristo and Joelle Taylor in 2023. They’re writers whose craft and activism we deeply admire, and it feels particularly fitting as we launch a new category that seeks to rebalance historical inequities in our emphasis on written over performed poetry. These approaches are in constant conversation with each other. We also hope it will increase the ways poets and audiences access and engage with the Prizes.’ Mónica Parle, Co-Executive Director, Forward Arts Foundation
‘I’ve been following the Forward for about thirty years now and I’ve long admired how it’s progressed and flourished through the decades. I’m looking forward to chairing the judging panel for the collections’ categories in 2023, not least because it will mean immersing myself in oceans of contemporary poetry. Poetry is essential to the creative and cultural life of the UK and every year this prize draws attention to the art form and enhances and celebrates the careers of the many writers who make its lists and win its prizes. Long may it continue.’ Bernardine Evaristo, Jury Chair, Collection Prizes 2023
‘This new category is great news for the wide range of poetics on offer, and will undoubtedly revive a scene damaged by the pandemic. I’m excited to be working with Forward to develop a new element to their work that reflects my long engagement in performance and spoken word.’ Joelle Taylor, Jury Chair, Single Poem Prizes 2023
In 1992 the current Poet Laureate Simon Armitage won the prize for Best First Collection, former Scottish Makar Jackie Kay won Best Single Poem, and Thom Gunn won the Best Collection. Since then, the Forward Prizes have become the most influential awards for new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. The three winning poets take their places on an astonishing list of previous winners which include many of contemporary literature’s most celebrated names: Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Claudia Rankine. This year’s winners are:
Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000)
All the Men I Never Married by Kim Moore (Seren)
Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000)
Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia (Granta Poetry)
Best Single Poem (£1,000)
‘Up Late’ by Nick Laird (Granta)
Kim Moore, All the Men I Never Married (Seren) deals with experiences of everyday sexism through forty-eight numbered poems and a gallery of exes and significant others. Stephen Sexton praised the book as a ‘tonally profound collection which is precise, careful, unfolding, whose methodical, numbered poems show us the work and process of overcoming people and encounters’ whilst the judges chair, Fatima Bhutto found the collection ‘full of dangerous wit and knowing humour that speaks directly to the reader in a hugely pleasurable way.’ Nadine Aisha Jassat described it as ‘a phenomenal and powerful collection, and one I urgently want to share with everyone I know. It feels so true, precise, brilliant and layered.’ Kim Moore of All the Men I Never Married: ‘I know that poetry can be transformative because it’s changed my life, and I wanted to see if I could write poetry that might change or shift people’s ways of thinking about sexism and gender-based microaggressions. What I didn’t expect is that the writing of the book changed me – my perceptions, my understanding of sexism and its impact on me.’
Amnion (Granta Poetry) by Stephanie Sy-Quia spotlights colonialism, class and migration through an accomplished blending of fiction, epic poetry and the lyric essay. Amnion explores the reverberations that the actions of one generation can have on the next, through acts of bravery and resistance, great and small. Judge alice hiller praised the collection for ‘working in crucial new territory around questions of migrations and gendered identity, both thematically, and in terms of delivery. Through the extended, fragmented form, Sy-Quia interlinks multiple generations and diverse identities, always questioning how the individual narratives are sited relative to the dominant power structures and historical realities shaping their outcomes.’ Rishi Dastidar said: ‘Amnion makes the blood flow faster, it is dazzling, new and exciting in the way it braids the personal with the broader context.’ Sy-Quia started writing Amnion when she was fifteen and has taken her nine years to complete: ‘Amnion is my attempt to wrestle with the metrics for provenance and belonging. The early passages of the book are very precious to me, because they represent the oldest material: there are phrases in there which date from my teens, and I like to think that their continued inclusion in the text is a kind of loyalty to former selves.’
Nick Laird wrote his winning poem ‘Up Late’ as an elegy to his father who died of Covid in March 2021. He said ‘it has a weird real-time element to it that wouldn’t be there if I’d been able to be with my father, so it’s of the moment in that sense. It was the peculiar circumstances of the covid pandemic, where you couldn’t be with your dying loved ones, that brought the poem about in that form.’ The judges felt Laird’s poem sincerely engaged with death, grief and the private and shared lived experience of the pandemic in ways which readers will find profoundly moving and cathartic.
The Forward Prizes winners this year highlight the importance of contemporary poetry to voice and process grief and to bend and play with the language of identity in ways readers can feel lived experience in moving, engaging and profound ways.
The Forward Prizes winners this year highlight the importance of contemporary poetry to voice and process grief and to bend and play with the language of identity in ways readers can feel lived experience in moving, engaging and profound ways.
William Sieghart, founder of the Forward Prizes said: ‘The Prizes have three aims; to deepen appreciation of poetry’s value, to celebrate excellence in poetry and to increase poetry’s audience. All that we have done over the last three decades was devised with these goals in mind and we are so grateful to our thoughtful and committed jury for the 2022 Prizes. The winners and shortlists reveal a vital benchmark of excellence, a celebration of talent and innovation, and a provocation for further creative endeavour.’
For further information, including Q&As with the winning poets, visit www.forwardartsfoundation.org
For interview requests: Dusty Miller PR dustymillerpr@gmail.com 07955 904 482 or Forward Arts Foundation info@forwardartsfoundation.org 020 7845 4655