News / Hadfield wins international poetry competition
SHETLAND-based poet Jen Hadfield has been announced as the winner of the 5th Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition during a ceremony at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, on Saturday evening.
Her poem The Kids was judged to be the best of an initial field of more than 1,100 entries from around the world.
Hadfield, who moved to Shetland in 2006, won the TS Eliot Prize for poetry in 2008 for her second collection of poems Nigh-No-Place.
The competition, sponsored by the University of Strathclyde and hosted by the book festival, offers £5,000 for the winning poem, one of the richest poetry prizes in the UK.
One of the judges, Scottish award winning poet Gillian Ferguson, said: “Really, really creepy – but in a good way… The Kids sounds like a nice soppy poem, but it would be pretty disturbing if these freaky offspring showed up at nursery.
“Personally, I’ve never noted that cats hunt rabbits by looking for steam escaping a warren, but it’s the kind of hyper-observed, unsettling detail that really makes this super-shivery poem.”
The competition had the support of, and is held in honour of, Edwin Morgan, who was Scotland’s Makar- national poet- and who died in 2010, aged 90.
Co-founder of the competition, Dr David Kinloch of the University of Strathclyde, added: “The competition continues to be a fitting tribute to Edwin Morgan, his influence and the esteem in which he is held around the world.”
Other winners in the competition were:
• 2nd prize (£1,000) – Look Hamewards, Now by Mike Vallely;
• 3rd prize (£500) – The Perils of Surgery by Malcolm Watson;
• runners-up (£50) – Peach by Daisy Behagg; forest glass by Katherine Sowerby;
• commended poems – Talking To Myself by Jo Bell; When a Voice Moved Upon the Waters by Jennifer Copley; The Antihero by Megan Fernandes; Nioclas Beanon of Ross Mhic Thrium and the Wire Immaterial by Nuala Keating; Antony Gormley in the Water of Leith by Nick McKinnon; Valentine by Derek Mcluckie; Slow by Wayne Price; The First Yins by Sylvia Telfer.
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