Poetry

Momtaza Mehri for Bad Diaspora Poems - WINNER

The definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry? Momtaza Mehri's debut collection poses this question, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Told in lyric, prose and text messages, and taking place in living rooms and marketplaces, on buses and balconies, on transatlantic journeys and online, these are essential poems about our diasporic age.   

This is an exceptional debut collection that is wide-ranging and ambitious, politically vital and poetically alive with an exquisite emotional heart. Mehri is a writer of refined insight, audacious imagination and artful technicality.

Karen McCarthy Woolf and Nathalie Teitler for editing the Mapping the Future anthology

Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the ‘other’ continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times.

Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works.

Jackie Kay for May Day

Jackie Kay has been a trailblazing figure in British poetry for more than three decades. In May Day, a landmark new collection, she sketches the political dimensions of love and loss in a sequence of elegies for her beloved parents. A host of Kay’s personal heroes walks alongside them in May Day’s parade: Nina Simone, Audre Lorde and the Pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton, shoulder to shoulder with Harry Belafonte, South African painter Albert Adams and the titanic actor-activist Paul Robeson.

Commemorating her parents’ work as committed socialists and trade unionists leads Kay to reflect on her own ‘Life in Protest’. In a chorus of protest songs tracing a through-line from the women’s rights and gay liberation campaigns of the 1980s to the Black Lives Matter movement of the present day, Kay urges us to stand in solidarity with one another, to let grief beget action rather than despair.

Infused with warmth, humour and much music, May Day is a life-affirming collection from one of the UK’s most cherished poets.