The standard of entries this year was so high that when it came right down to it we simply could not decide between two excellent poets whose poems and proposals complemented each other so well. Therefore, after securing additional funding, we are able to announce the following winners
Huge Congratulations to Jay Bernard and Jonathan Morley.
We were blown away by Jay’s poetry and excited by the Word & Image possibilities inherent in her skills as a graphic artist. Her proposal revolves around the virtually forgotten black characters in British life and folklore from the pre-Anglo Saxon to the early renaissance although her ‘conceit’ is zero time and her intention to allow these to be ‘sensible’ to each other on the same plane.
The poems will avoid the progression of English History into slavery; since poems, songs and stories are not just reflections of what we understand but how we understand, this pamphlet defamiliarises the present by re-imagining the past.
Jonathan Morley
Jonathan’s proposal is all about language – we were mesmerised by the language of his poetry and his different voices – and his focus is also from history in the person of Dr Philemon Holland (1552-1637). Holland was the ‘Translator General in his age’, later reviled and admired and now forgotten, who ‘Englished’ the classics and whose handwriting may have been the model for the Baskerville typeface. Jonathan’s use of different fonts in both his poems and proposal opens up a world of Word & Image possibilities.
Lost libraries, half-ruined buildings, the contested hand of the translator, Bardolatry vs. the escape from personality, abstruse texts and dusty reputations – the imaginative possibiities are interesting.
Each poet will receive £2000, a published pamphlet, 100 copies of that pamphlet to do with as they wish and a reading at Café Writers at Take Five in Norwich. We have no strict deadlines or publication dates as yet but plan to keep you informed and publish extracts as the pamphlets are developed.
It is all very exciting.
Finally, we felt that our unsuccessful finalists deserved at the very least to be Commended.
These are
Kiran Millwood-Hargrave & Tom de Freston
Helen Ivory, Kate Birch and (fellow judge) Chris Gribble