Forward Prizes 2022: ‘The Oscars of Poetry’ is Coming to Manchester

The winners of this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry will be announced on 28 November 2022 at a live event at Contact, Manchester, which puts young people at the heart of their decision-making and creative practice.

This new partnership sees the Forward Prizes for Poetry looking forward to the next 30 years with a reinvigorated commitment to supporting emerging and diverse talent across the UK and Ireland as well as building diverse mass audiences for poetry.

The Forward Prizes are the most influential awards for new poetry published in the UK and Ireland, and over the last three decades have lauded some of the most recognised names in poetry including Simon Armitage, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, Claudia Rankine, Jackie Kay and Caleb Femi.

The Forward Prizes are distinctive for championing new voices and internationally renowned poets alike. The shortlisted poets perfectly encapsulate the Forward Poetry Prizes dual role to celebrate excellence and welcome readers into the world of contemporary poetry.

The Prizes are awarded in three categories: the Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000), the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000) and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (£1,000), and collections represent a mix of new voices and significant names.

The Forward Prizes shortlists this year highlight the work of contemporary poetry to voice and process grief, to bend and play with the language of identity, to challenge and inhabit silence and to weave politics and spirituality into ways readers can feel lived experience in powerful and engaging ways.

The Forward Poetry prize shortlists 2022 recognize works from the poetry lists from the big houses, with Chatto & Windus receiving two nominations in the Best Collection category and another in Best First Collection, whilst independent publishers continue to show their importance in the poetry landscape, particularly in their skills and support publishing emerging talent, with four out of five of the Best First Collection shortlisting. The shortlists also welcome the first shortlisting from Bloomsbury’s inaugural poetry list (overseen by editor Kayo Chingonyi who was shortlisted for A Blood Condition in 2021 Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection) with the jazz-inflected grief sonnets of Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert.

Lucy Macnab, Co-Executive Director of the Forward Arts Foundation, the charity which runs the Forward Prizes, said, ‘we view this partnership with Keisha Thompson and Contact as a significant step toward our future strategic vision: to move away from the dominance of London in the UK’s creative and cultural life; a drive toward working more inclusively with young people, emerging voices, and diverse audiences, putting them at the centre of our practice; and working with partners that put poetry at the heart of their creative offer.’ Keisha Thompson, the first practicing poet to lead a theatre as Artistic Director, adds, ‘Poetry has always been a big part of what we do at Contact and it’s going to be so important to me as I lead the theatre. Partnering with the Forward Prizes is a wonderful way to start.’

Fatima Bhutto: ‘As the Chair of the Forward Prize judges, to spend the better part of a year thinking about poetry has been an incredible gift. The collections we pored over reminded me of care and the power strangers exert over each other in so many delicate and fragile ways. We have assembled here a collection of debut writers, masters, believers and doubters, all of them innate observers of our intimate lives. Some of them you may already know, others will be a revelation.’

Mónica Parle, Co- Executive Director of the Forward Arts Foundation: ‘We are incredibly proud of this year’s shortlist: it represents such a strong mix of known names and new talent, and perfectly embodies our aims at Forward, to champion the diverse scope of contemporary poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Through the reading and shortlisting process, the judges spoke often about their sense of responsibility toward the incredible selection of books submitted, and how they felt that the wealth of works in contention across in all categories is a strong testament to the vitality of poetry in the UK today.’

FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION

Pilgrim Bell, by Kaveh Akbar (Chatto & Windus) examines how the profane is inextricably entangled with the sacred and includes poems which question the poet’s identity as an Iranian-American and whether they are themselves potentially supporting a fetishizing western gaze. Fatima Bhutto, chair of the judging panel ‘Akbar is masterful at folding politics into his poetry,’ whilst Rishi Dastidar said, ‘Akbar shows how a spiritual life can be conducted in a society which makes it hard to do that.’

With Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury), Anthony Joseph weighs the impact of being the son of a (mostly) absent father. Judge Nadine Aisha Jassat described Sonnets for Albert as ‘a testament to grief at a time when grief is so key,’ whilst alice hiller commented, ‘meeting the poet’s selves at different ages, seeing them from multiple angles, sharing moments of loss and incomprehension, as well as a huge generosity of love, Sonnets for Albert has the capacity to connect with many readers.’

Shane McCrae’s Cain Named the Animal (Little Brown) expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections. Cain Named the Animal responds to themes of childhood sexual abuse and societal violence within a larger project of creative witness and transformation. Stephen Sexton said, ‘This is a book of articulate, poignant lyrics and profound, startling absences: the ruptures of trauma, the heaven of after, and the incompletely complete narratives that make up a life.’

Kim Moore, All the Men I Never Married (Seren) is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. 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 Bhutto said, ‘full of knowing humour that speaks directly to the reader.’

The Illustrated Woman by Helen Mort (Chatto & Windus) is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body – from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Rishi Dastidar praised the book ‘as wildly impressive in its ability to balance its subjects with a questing intelligence without losing a human core.’

FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION

Certain themes present in the Best Collection shortlist – of loss, survival and resistance, of crossing borders of time and space, of the personal as political – also appear in the shortlist for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd (Haymarket) powerfully lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism as he traces the exile of his grandmother through poems of wit and dignity. In English Summer (Penned in the Margins), Holly Hopkins confronts the illusions and paradoxes of history with a rare warmth and sympathy in poems populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt-out country piles. Padraig Regan’s original and honest poems in Some Integrity (Carcanet) explore queerness as a way of looking that provides an exhilarating extension to the Irish lyric tradition. The judges were thrilled that the long-awaited first full-length poetry collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (Chatto & Windus) from Warsan Shire did not disappoint. Her poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience are vital, courageous and moving. Amnion (Granta) by Stephanie Sy-Quia journeys from the Philippines to Libya, through France, Spain, and the UK, and keenly charts what it means to grow up in a family divided by geography, history and language.

The 2022 judging panel is chaired by writer Fatima Bhutto. She is joined by poets Stephen Sexton, Rishi Dastidar, alice hiller, and Nadine Aisha Jassat.

The 2022 judges’ selection of shortlisted and highly commended poems will be published on 29 September 2022 in the annual Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber). The Forward Prizes are joined by the Creative Critics’ competition, where 16–19 year-olds write poems in response to work shortlisted for the Prizes. https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry-2/forward-emagazine-creative-critics-competition/