For the first time, an outstanding performance of a poem will be celebrated with a dedicated award as part of the Forward prizes for poetry.
The shortlists for the 2023 prizes, announced today, feature categories for the best collection, debut collection and single written poem along with the new award for best performed poem.
Best Collection
Self Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant
Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan
A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke
The Ink Cloud Reader by Kit Fan
My Name is Abilene by Elizabeth Sennitt Clough
The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection
ISDAL by Susannah Dickey
A Method, A Path by Rowan Evans
Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri
Cowboy by Kandace Siobhan Walker
Best Single Poem – Written
My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce by Kathryn Bevis
Libation by Malika Booker
Oh do you know the Flower Man by Kizziah Burton
The Curse by Breda Spaight
Fricatives by Eric Yip
Best Single Poem – Performed
Human. This Embodied Knowledge by Zena Edwards
The Cat Prince by Michael Pedersen
Almost Certainly by Bohdan Piasecki
The City Kids See the Sea by Roger Robinson
And our eyes are on Europe by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
“The performance category is a much-needed addition to the literary prize,” poet and chair of judges for the best single poems panel Joelle Taylor told the Guardian. “Historically, spoken word artists have been ignored by the poetry establishment, and this prize means that is no longer possible. It signals that spoken word and performed poetry is as valuable, dynamic and exploratory as published works.”
The winner of the inaugural performance prize will receive £1,000. The shortlisted entrants include TS Eliot and Ondaatje prize winner Roger Robinson for his performance of The City Kids See the Sea and Bohdan Piasecki for Almost Certainly, which incorporates gentle guitar music through a poem that narrates an explosion. Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe was shortlisted for And our eyes are on Europe, a poetic response to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The “poetry film” sees Zak/Eipe reciting in a sunlit room and walking a quiet city street.
Poet Caroline Bird said it felt “momentous” to be judging poems in two “distinct yet symbiotic” areas – the “stage of the page with its haunted white space and line-break breaths” as well as the physical stage, “to witness how a poem exists in the air between poet and audience, and within the body of the poet themselves”.
The winner of the best collection award will receive £10,000. The shortlist includes Mary Jean Chan’s forthcoming Bright Fear, which touches on anti-Asian racism caused by Covid, and Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self Portrait as Othello, exploring Black immigrant identities.
Author and chair of judges for the best collections panel Bernardine Evaristo told the Guardian that the shortlisted poets are “distinctive” and “distinct from” each other. “We find among them an impressive array of inventiveness, a flourishing of ideas and a deep engagement with not only the self but also society at large.”
The poetry sector needs to be “responsive to how our societies change and develop” and be willing to embrace new voices, communities, subject matter and audiences, added Evaristo.
Alongside Evaristo on the best collections judging panel are the poets Kate Fox, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Andrés Ordorica and Jessica Traynor. On the best single poems panel, Taylor and Bird are joined by radio producer and author Sue Roberts and poets Khadijah Ibrahiim and Chris Redmond.
Fricatives by Eric Yip, which is shortlisted in the best written poem category, won the 2021 National Poetry competition. Yip, an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge, became the youngest ever winner of the prize aged 19. His poem plays with language to address themes of race and migration. “I wanted to almost trap the poem in a sonic cage of repeating sounds,” he said.
The prizes were established in 1992 and have since recognised some of the biggest names in poetry, including Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy. This year’s winners will be announced on 16 October.
“I like to think that these shortlists, dominated by writers who probably would have struggled to get published 10 years ago, represent a propulsive future for poetry,” adds Evaristo. “One which is constantly opening up to new influences and renewing its ambitions.”
