The winners of our 18th competition are below. Scroll down to view judges’ comments. To read previous years winning poems check out our anthologies page.
The 2024 Competition
1st Prize Once Upon A Time – Gill Learner (Reading, UK)
Gill Learner was born in 1939 near Birmingham and now lives in Reading. Having worked in the printing trade, she then taught printing studies. Since beginning to write poetry in 2001 she has won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2008 and the Buxton poetry competition (2011). She has had three collections published by Two Rivers Press, Reading: The Agister’s Experiment (2011), Chill Factor (2016) and Change (2021); all have had positive reviews.
Praise for: The Agister’s Experiment: “This first collection from Gill Learner displays a confidence usually seen in a much more experienced poet … The poems here fizz and crackle while exploring the vast range of humanity – they are by turns funny, chilling and angry, but are all diverse in form and content. A strong sense of loss pervades these poems, too, and this nostalgia for times past, reflected in poems about motherhood and legends retold, leave a lasting impression on the reader in this excellent debut.” – Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2011
More here.
2nd Prize The Chariot – Theophilus Kwek (Singapore)
Theophilus Kwek studied at the Raffles Institution in Singapore, before reading History and Politics at Merton College, Oxford University. He also has a Masters in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from Oxford University.
He has published four full-length collections of poetry, They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue (2011), Circle Line (2013), Giving Ground (2016) and Moving House (2020). Both Circle Line and Giving Ground were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize, in 2014 and 2018 respectively. In addition, his pamphlet, The First Five Storms (2017), was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award and won the inaugural New Poets’ Prize. In 2023, he was the youngest writer (and first Singaporean) to be awarded the Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute, for poetry that “defends the inviolability of life”. He is part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. His most recent collection is Moving House, published by Carcanet Press.
More here.
3rd Prize To Poison – Sue Davies (Catisfield, UK)
Sue Davies, is a prize winning poet, who lives in Catisfield, Fareham. Her first collection of poetry Blue Water Cafe was published by Oversteps Books in 2014 and her second collection of poems Split the lark in 2021.
She won 1st prize in the Royal Navy Museum competition, was highly commended in both the Second Light competition and the Winchester poetry competition and received a prize in the Salopian Society competition.
Highly Commended
4th You had to learn how to live after her – Monica Carroll (ACT, Australia)
A powerful portrait of an abusive and poisonous mother, portrayed as a Black Widow spider. A brave and gutsy poem, with the spider metaphor brilliantly sustained throughout.
5th Amalgam – Fiona Lynch (Victoria, Australia)
A very well-crafted and moving poem about the mistreatment of children within the Australian child protection system, using a metaphor of dental care to illustrate the devastating consequences of maltreatment.
6th Childhood Fears – Naoise Gale (Norwich, UK)
An excellent and brutally honest listing of some of the many things women fear as they are growing up, and the lasting misogyny they are subject to.
The remaining top twenty highly commended in no particular order:
Rice 244 Days – Lavinia Small (Oamaru, New Zealand)
2029, and the last environmentalist… – Steve Pottinger (Willenhall, UK)
A Guide to Parenting, with Macaques on Itsukushima – Jonathan Greenhause (Jersey City, USA)
Hull – Jane Burn (Consett, UK)
The mirror test – Andy Craven-Griffiths (Leeds, UK)
A Song Of The River Teign – Sheila Aldous (Newton Abbot, UK)
Hippocampus – Christopher M James (Tamnies, France)
An Immigrant’s Curse – Pratibha Castle (Walberton, UK)
Cezanne’s Paysage D’Auvers-Sur-Oise – Isabella Mead (Bristol, UK)
Total-ly partial eclipse of the heart – Paul Hawkes (Aberteifi, Wales)
The Improbability Of Flight – Anne Bradshaw (Hexham, UK)
Rhosys cochion, lilis gwynion – David Walrond (Porthkea, UK)
Jolly Roger – Shoshanna Rockman (Elsternwick, Australia)
Homage to Monteverde – Gwendolyn Sobkowiak (Pittsburgh, USA)
Special mentions
In addition Kathy also liked the following poems/poets, who also deserve a mention. In no particular order they are as follows:
The Instinct – Lucy Crispin (Wray, UK)
The Plant – Aidan Casey (Murcia, Spain)
If I were incarcerated like Lorina Bulwer – Vivienne Tregenza (Penzance, UK)
Glossolalia – Anne Casey (NSW, Australia)
Stop press: pit tragedy claims lives of men, women, children – Christian Donovan (Kilgetty, Wales)
Some sisters use the word ‘harmonious’ – Anne Ryland (Berwick upon Tweed, UK)
Leda and the swan – Sharon Rockman (Elsternwick, Australia)
In conversation with Antonio Machado – Becky May (Manchester, UK)
Results were announced on our website, Welsh Writers Facebook Group, various blogs and Twitter (X). We have also informed the UK national press, Literature Wales, Pontypridd Observer and associated district newspapers, SW Echo, the Western Mail, BBC Wales, Wales Arts Review, Nation Cymru, Ponty Pages, Storyville Books and RCTCBC as well as many organisations on our mailing list. Thanks to Kathy Miles for judging this year’s competition, and thanks also to all those who entered and look forward to reading your work next year.
Judge’s Comments
Judging a poetry competition is always a humbling experience, not just because of the exceptional standard of the work, but because so many of the poems let you into the private and personal world of the poet. Over 700 poems were submitted to the competition, and judging them was a daunting task. Subjects were wide-ranging and included many pieces that dealt with the political issues of our time, particularly climate change and the war in Gaza. Others were more intimate – sometimes devastating – poems that described incidents of abuse, rape and misogyny, cancer and chemotherapy, or were focussed on the dementia or loss of a loved one. Whilst all of the entrants are to be congratulated on the very high standard of their submissions, I also applaud the bravery of those who had the courage to share what were often heart-breaking stories.
I was hoping to see well-crafted pieces that reached out from the internal world of the poem to make a real connection with the reader, and wasn’t disappointed. Selecting the winners from such a wide and varied field was difficult; many other poems very nearly made it to the shortlist, and a lot of them will remain in my mind for a long time. I’m absolutely sure that all of those will find their place in the world very soon.
Many congratulations to all the winners, and to everyone who submitted to the competition; it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to read such a wealth of excellent poems.
1st ONCE UPON A TIME – Gill Learner
Like all good narratives, this poem gripped me from the beginning. Once Upon a Time tells the tale of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, who staved off the threat of beheading by relating stories to her husband the king each night; the king was so anxious to hear how each tale ended, that he postponed her death for yet another day. What made this poem rise to the top of the pile was not only the strength and beauty of the imagery, but the elevated language and impeccable crafting of the piece. A well-written narrative poem can occasionally become a little dull in reading, as the poet struggles to maintain both the pace of the narrative and the constraints of the form they are using, but in this case, pace and story are perfectly maintained to the end of the poem. Little half-rhymes and vowel rhymes scattered through the stanzas give the piece a lyrical quality, and so the poem itself almost becomes one of the tales of the Arabian Nights. But the poem is more than a simple retelling of the story. Written in the voice of Scheherazade, the poet has given her an unusual motivation for her marriage to the king (and after all, without an overriding motive, who would want to marry a husband who beheaded his wives each night?). This Scheherazade is not a gold-digger wishing to sample the rich trappings of the court: ‘What I wanted / crooned like flutes in courtyards, lay in cisterns, cool / and sleek.’ In a hot, dry country blasted by Simoon winds and chafing sands, what the storyteller craves is plentiful water, ‘the days of bathing till my fingers rippled, the rubbing-in / of almond oil scented with sandalwood and rose.’ By the end of the poem, Scheherazade’s fear has turned to love and pity for her lord; with her tales finished, wondering if he will indeed kill her, her last thought is of water: ‘If I must die, then let me drown.’ Well-conceived and researched, brilliant executed, the sheer craftsmanship and elegance of this poem make it a very worthy winner.
2nd THE CHARIOT – Theophilus Kwek
The Chariot is again a wonderfully crafted poem which is carried along by its rhythm and pace. Written in four separated stanza parts, each representing a different time period, it centres around an old Singer Chariot sewing machine belonging to the grandmother of the narrator, a grandmother whose hands are ‘spotted like the sun,’ her skin rippling ‘in minute creases as gauze does / when a single thread has come loose.’ The machine itself – and its subsequent absence – frames the narrator’s childhood, with the language of sewing and needlework subtly stitching together the separate parts of the poem. The machine is seen almost as part of the family, ‘so snug in the room’s architecture / it occurs to no-one that it’s gone.’ In the third stanza, a time-shift takes us back to when the machine, no longer of use, became the repository for bedsheets, pillows, a cot for the grandchildren, ‘another flat surface / on which the things of this earth could accumulate.’ In the final section, the poet turns our attention to the discovery of a pair of old gloves, and speculates on whether they were home-stitched for the local factory on machines such as this, the mothers sewing the gloves ‘night / after night, feet in the stirrup – and their daughters / dim-lit by a muted serial, waiting to smooth out / the fingers.’ There are hints, too, of a harsher side to life; the women working through the night to complete the gloves for the factory, gloves that will not be counted in terms of labour, but as profit and loss for the owner; ‘a doused spark’ in the grandmother’s eye. The stunning ending suggests the continuity of these cycles of work and family, the profit and loss of human life itself:
‘Wheels turn, somewhere a needle moves.
In her hands a thread goes taut, and runs and runs.’
I loved the delicacy of this accomplished poem and the superb control of language and imagery, which threaded themselves into my thoughts over and over during the judging process.
3rd TO POISON – S M Davies
To Poison is a love poem, an ode which in this case is addressed not to a suitor, but to the poisonous substances used in chemotherapy and the treatment of cancer. What I find particularly skilful about this poem is the way the poet very carefully handles the subject, taking us through the various stages of a toxic human/chemical relationship, which begins with adoration – ‘you adore unadulterated green, nature’s favourite’ – and eventually ends with disillusionment and disappointment. The poison/lover is seen in terms of colour throughout, as the poet details different elements and toxins, both chemical and plant-based, used in the process of treatment. At the beginning of the poem this lover is seen relishing in pure colour, the narrator’s pain buried in Rothko’s ‘pastose of surface purity’. As the poem progresses, however, we start to see a darker side; how it is turned on by ‘arsenic toxic as cyanide embedded in bitter-sweet /apple pips’; how its kisses are ‘narcissistic, mine like kissing God.’ In the next stanza we learn that ‘Venom lies at the root of your alchemy,’ as the poet lists the various poisonous plants and trees which can also be used for medical purposes. Towards the end there is a shift in the emotional weight of the poem; from being a vain, narcissistic lover, a saviour from illness, the narrator realises that its apology is ‘a cover / for malice. I feel you did love me once / a love tainted by vanity. You entered my blood professing to save me.’
This lover leaves the narrator’s arms ‘pale birchwood, / my bones hollow as a heron, its plumes ash-grey’, at the end being rendered ‘pure, abstract, / your latest work of untitled art.’ I imagine this was a difficult poem to write, but the courage with which the poet has approached the subject, and the care taken in its construction, make it a very worthy winner of third place.
Kathy Miles, August 2024
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