.Many thanks to all the poets who entered the competition.
Entries were judged anonymously by poet Diana Cant.
Diana is a graduate of Keele University and is a Consultant Child Psychotherapist who has worked for many years with highly distressed and depressed young people, many of whom are often in residential care. She won the inaugural Child Psychotherapy Essay Prize, has written many articles and professional papers, and contributed to mental health programmes on BBC 4.
She has an MA in Poetry Writing from Newcastle University through the Poetry School in London. She is a member of the Mid Kent Stanza Group, and the Canada Water Poetry Group. Her work has been published in Finished Creatures, The Alchemy Spoon, Brittle Star, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Nine Muses, Her poetry has also appeared in various anthologies such as Humanagerie, Eighty Four, Places of Poetry and Beyond the Storm. She was longlisted in the Ginko Prize, 2019, and commended in the Hippocrates Prize in 2021. Her pamphlet, Student Bodies 1968, was published by Clayhanger Press in 2020. Her second pamphlet At Risk was published by Dempsey & Windle this year.
Diana made the following comments on the entries:
First of all, I’d like to commend all the poets on their submissions – there was a rich range of subject matter and use of form, and clearly much dedication and commitment to poetic craft. I was impressed by the amount of sheer hard work that has clearly gone into all these submissions.
The winning pamphlet, ‘Oblivion’, is a collection of poems around the theme of parenthood – motherhood, to be precise, and the complex and ambivalent feelings that parenting a young child can bring. There is an emotional honesty that is often captured by unusual and arresting images, made more powerful by the details of the everyday. It is the attention to these details that avoids over-sentimentality and gives the poems their resonance and immediacy.
Entries were judged anonymously by poet Diana Cant.
Diana is a graduate of Keele University and is a Consultant Child Psychotherapist who has worked for many years with highly distressed and depressed young people, many of whom are often in residential care. She won the inaugural Child Psychotherapy Essay Prize, has written many articles and professional papers, and contributed to mental health programmes on BBC 4.
She has an MA in Poetry Writing from Newcastle University through the Poetry School in London. She is a member of the Mid Kent Stanza Group, and the Canada Water Poetry Group. Her work has been published in Finished Creatures, The Alchemy Spoon, Brittle Star, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Nine Muses, Her poetry has also appeared in various anthologies such as Humanagerie, Eighty Four, Places of Poetry and Beyond the Storm. She was longlisted in the Ginko Prize, 2019, and commended in the Hippocrates Prize in 2021. Her pamphlet, Student Bodies 1968, was published by Clayhanger Press in 2020. Her second pamphlet At Risk was published by Dempsey & Windle this year.
Diana made the following comments on the entries:
First of all, I’d like to commend all the poets on their submissions – there was a rich range of subject matter and use of form, and clearly much dedication and commitment to poetic craft. I was impressed by the amount of sheer hard work that has clearly gone into all these submissions.
The winning pamphlet, ‘Oblivion’, is a collection of poems around the theme of parenthood – motherhood, to be precise, and the complex and ambivalent feelings that parenting a young child can bring. There is an emotional honesty that is often captured by unusual and arresting images, made more powerful by the details of the everyday. It is the attention to these details that avoids over-sentimentality and gives the poems their resonance and immediacy.