THE DEREK WALCOTT PRIZE FOR POETRY
Congratulations to this year’s short list!
The winner will be announced on October 15th, at the fall book launch featuring new work by Sven Birkerts, Glyn Maxwell, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg.
Antonella Anedda, Historiae, tr. by Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli, (NYRB)'
Ned Denny, Ventriloquise, (Carcanet Press)
Martina Evans, The Coming Thing, (Carcanet Press)
Sergey Gandlevsky, Ochre & Rust, tr. by Philip Metres, (Green Linden Press)
Mireille Gansel, Soul House, tr. by Joan Seliger Sidney (World Poetry Books)
Nick Laird, Up Late, (Faber & Faber)
Michael Lavers, The Inextinguishable, (University of Tampa Press)
Paula Meehan, The Solace of Artemis, (Dedalus Press)
Pierre Nepveu, The Four-Doored House, tr. by Donald Winkler, (Signal Editions, Véhicule Press)
Erin Noteboom, A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, (Brick Books)
Romeo Oriogun, The Gathering of Bastards, (University of Nebraska Press)
Christopher Reid, Toys / Tricks / Traps, (Faber & Faber)
Óscar García Sierra, Houston, I'm the Problem, tr. by Carmen Yus Quintero, (World Poetry Books)
Ostap Slyvynsky, Winter King, tr. by Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova, (Lost Horse Press)
Hannah Sullivan, Was It For This, (Faber & Faber)
Prize Entry
Arrowsmith Press, in partnership with The Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, presents the annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry to be awarded to a full-length book of poems by a living poet who is not a US citizen (green card holders welcome) published in the previous calendar year.
The book must be in English or in English translation, and may have been published anywhere in the world.
The prize includes a $2,000 cash award. In the case of translations, the prize money may be shared by the poet and the translator.
This year’s prize will be judged by esteemed writer Diane Mehta.
Publishers, authors, and others are invited to enter books published between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023. Submission form and 2 copies of each book must be received by February 15, 2024. There is a $20 submission fee per book submitted. Unlimited submissions allowed. Two hard copies of each book should be mailed to Arrowsmith Press, 11 Chestnut Street, Medford, MA 02155. The prize committee hopes to work with publishers to coordinate an event along with their author’s touring schedule.
THIS YEAR’S WINNER:
Arrowsmith Press, in conjunction with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and The Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, are delighted to announce that the winner of the annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is Mosab Abu Toha for Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear published by City Lights. The winner was selected by author Canisia Lubrin from a short list of twelve finalists.
About Abu Toha’s work, Lubrin writes:
Here is a book which revels at an impossible pitch, the potent will to live heart-first in confrontation with life under brutal siege. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is a supertonic glossary of sorrows so extreme it bends the brace of language into fortifying, never-naïve, elegy. Toha’s meticulous, and often brief, lines thread his own breathing witness into a poetry of mighty resolve, insisting poetry itself be worthy of a Palestinian lament. Toha insists on these songs, holding each by their own powerful weight and bond, into this rippling of a future out beyond the page. This is a work of great restraint and abundant attention presented as always waiting in the routine arrangements of the day-to-day. Such grace and understanding, daring because necessary, necessary because how powerful it is to hear a voice cut so sharply through today. So haunting, so searing, and above all, so lit by Mosab Abu Toha’s vibrant—what else to call it?—love.
Author Bio
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems. The collection won an American Book Award, a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Journal, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and the New York Review of Books, among others.
Abu Toha will receive a $2,000 cash prize. Established in 2019, the annual prize is for a book in English or English translation by a living poet writing in any language who is not a US citizen (green card holders welcome) published in the previous calendar year.
To learn more about this book or to purchase it, visit:
https://citylights.com/general-poetry/things-you-may-find-hidden-in-my-ear/
Submissions for the 2023 Walcott Prize are now open. To learn more, visit:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/walcott
PREVIOUS WINNERS
2021 Winner
Arrowsmith Press, in conjunction with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and The Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, are delighted to announce that the winner of the third annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is Saddiq Dzukogi for Your Crib, My Qibla published by University of Nebraska Press. The winner was selected by author Carolyn Forché from a short list of twelve finalists.
About Saddiq Dzukogi’s work, Forché writes:
Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla is a profound work of mourning, the title a vortex of faith and intimate loss, wherein the stone of grief, the weight of it, presses against the cage of breath. Dzukogi’s distilled imagery and meditative eloquence offer the reader flashes of recognition and rare insight into the unimaginable and dreaded experience of the death of one’s child. Wherein your headstone was, he writes, I put a mirror/ each time I come to visit/ I see that you live in my face. There is a poignant tribute to Paul Celan’s Todesfugue, and moments of beautiful linguistic synesthesia: your voice like a swarm of locusts/ glazing the trees and the courtyard stills in a seethe of bees. I found myself often breathless reading this work, entering the poems and emerging in raw clearings of exceptional clarity. He acknowledges how this grief appears/ in writing, a thing language cannot decipher, and yet he has come close. I have chosen this book as winner of The Derek Walcott Prize, named in honor of a poet who would have recognized the extraordinary accomplishment of this book.
Author Bio
Saddiq Dzukogi holds a degree in mass communication from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Nigeria), and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A 2017 finalist of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. Dzukogi’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, African American Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere.
Dzukogi will receive a $1,000 cash prize. Established in 2019, the annual prize is for a book in English or English translation by a living poet writing in any language who is not a US citizen (green card holders welcome) published in the previous calendar year.
To learn more about this book or to purchase it, visit: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496225771/
2020 WINNERS
Arrowsmith Press, in conjunction with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and The Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, are delighted to announce that the co-winners of the second annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry are Canisia Lubrin for The Dyzgraphxst and Serhiy Zhadan for A New Orthography translated John Hennessy & Ostap Kin. The winners were selected by poet Major Jackson from a short list of twenty worthy finalists. The winners will split the $1,000 prize. Established in 2019, the annual prize is for a book in English or English translation by a living poet writing in any language who is not a US citizen (green card holders welcome) published in the previous calendar year.
About Canisia Lubrin’s work, Jackson wrote:
Gorgeously layered, ambitious in scope, The Dyzgraphxst performs a marvelous resistance to simple orthodoxies of selfhood in poetry. Lubrin reimagines the contours of genre and form, even language’s possibility for complexity, plenitude, fracture, and assemblage.
Commenting on Serhiy Zhadan’s work, as translated by John Hennessy & Ostap Kin, Jackson noted:
The devastating and wildly charming poems in Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, written in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War, once again make a startling case for the predominance of a lyrical imagination, especially during a geopolitical crisis. One might expect such poems to retreat to embittered irony or surreal escape. I am astounded at the large-scale heart of this work, the courageous persistence of an autonomous voice remarking on the dailiness of life in war time with apparent whimsy and an undercutting joy.
A hybrid reading will be held with this year’s poets, along with Julia Copus, recipient of the 2019 Walcott Prize, at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Avenue, in May of 2022.
For further information, contact arrowsmithpress@gmail.com
2019 Winner
‘Julia Copus’s poems are acts of resistance. The material tests its own boundaries to become something new. She is not limited to – or by – personal experience. One of the many pleasures of this phenomenal collection, her first for seven years, is that you cannot predict the varied ways in which these poems will fly.' — The Observer
Julia Copus was born in London and now lives in Somerset. She has won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2010). She also writes for radio; her first play, Eenie Meenie Macka Racka, was awarded the BBC’s Alfred Bradley prize. She is a Lector for the Royal Literary Fund, and in 2008 was made an Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter. She wrote the Harry and Lil series of picture books.
About The Walcott Festival & Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
In 2019, the Walcott Festival showcased an exhibition of oils and watercolour paintings as well as storyboards by the Nobel Laureate; fully subscribed Writing Workshops with playwright Kate Snodgrass and poet Ishion Hutchinson; as well as a panel discussion at Medulla Art Gallery; and a Poetry Reading hosted by the Australian High Commission in April and May. In September (26-29th) ‘Ti Jean & His Brothers’ opens at Queen’s Hall, Trinidad. Written by Walcott, the play will be directed by Wendell Manwarren and feature music by Andre Tanker.
“My sister, Elizabeth and I are truly honored and excited about the annual Derek Walcott Prize for poetry, which will give poets worldwide an opportunity to have their work published and showcased,” Anna Walcott-Hardy, co-executor of the Walcott Estate said recently. “Our father always remembered the help he got and believed strongly in supporting up and coming writers. He founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 1981 at Boston University -- it’s an award-winning professional theatre dedicated to new works, and we look forward to attending the readings there, as well as hosting the winner in Trinidad and St Lucia. Our special thanks to Kate Snodgrass and Askold Melnyczuk for making this a reality and to the dedicated committee of the Festival.”
Founded in 1981 at Boston University by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre is an award-winning professional theatre dedicated to new works. At the core of its programs is the Playwriting MFA offered at Boston University in the celebrated English Department in the College of Arts & Sciences and in collaboration with the award-winning School of Theatre in the College of Fine Arts. Alumni playwrights have been produced in regional and New York houses as well as in London’s West End, and their works have garnered national, regional, and Boston awards, including numerous Best New Script Awards from the Elliot Norton committee and the Independent Reviewers of New England. BPT’s Season of New Plays employs the best of New England’s professional actors, directors, and designers to bring each playwright’s vision alive.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January, 1930 – 17 March, 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught graduate and undergraduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.