With winner Sandeep Parmar and shortlisted poets Judy Brown, Emma Hammond, John McCullough and John Clegg. Find out more about each poet below.
For more information about the prize, see https://www.poetry-festival.co.uk/ledbury-forte-poetry-prize/
Read the judges comments on each collection Tara Bergin’s Comments
Emma Hammond’s first collection, tunth-sk, was published in 2011 by Flipped Eye. In addition she has self-published two pamphlets, softly softly catchy monkey and Sleeveless Errand. She has performed at many events in London over the last ten years. Emma works as a freelance copywriter and has taught experimental poetry for the Poetry School.
In her spare time she mentors children at the Ministry of Stories.
Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough’s tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love.
Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton’s gay scene, Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari First Book Prize. Spacecraft navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people.
‘Judy Brown’s deliciously tactile Crowd Sensations … quietly twists concrete subjects from a cricket umpire to a cockroach into unsettling new shapes, a “mutable alphabet”.’ – The Telegraph
Poet Judy Brown’s new collection, Crowd Sensations, is a worthy follow-up to her Forward-prize nominated debut, Loudness.
Partly a modern revision of the Helen myth, Eidolon by Sandeep Parmar meditates on the visible and invisible forces of Western civilisation from classical antiquity to present-day America.
Holy Toledo! is a history of English literary criticism in the twentieth century, a bestiary of the American Southwest, an unreliable guide to the desert.
Generous, humorous, happily askew, John Clegg’s first Carcanet collection signals the flourishing of an ‘emerging’ poet as a major voice.