James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 shortlist announced
Bloodaxe Books and Newcastle University are pleased to announce the shortlist for the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024. Three equal winners will be chosen from the shortlist of six, with the winning poets announced at a special online reading to be held on Wednesday 20 November 2024.
The prize was judged by Imtiaz Dharker, Major Jackson, Nathalie Teitler, Theresa Muñoz, and Neil Astley. The judges received almost 100 submissions and were delighted with the high quality of the entries.
Nine of the poets who most impressed the judges will read at a free online event run by Bloodaxe Books with Newcastle University on Wednesday 20 November at 7pm (details below). The six shortlisted and three commended poets will read from their work ahead of the announcement of the three joint equal winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024. The three winners will each receive £1000 plus a year’s mentoring (by Patience Agbabi, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Jacob Sam-La Rose) towards the publication of their debut collections with Bloodaxe Books in 2026.
Shortlist
Clementine Ewokolo Burnley
Nadine El-Enany
Roshni Gallagher
Amina Jama
Ilisha Thiru Purcell
Fae Wolfe
Commended poets
Lillian Akampurira Aujo
Christy Ku
Wendelin Law
Lillian Akampurira Aujo is a writer from Uganda. Her writing has been published by HarperVia, New Internationalist, Prairie Schooner, Transition Magazine, among others. She is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing (Poetry) programme at the University of East Anglia, where she was a Global Voices Scholar.
Clementine Ewokolo Burnley was born in Cameroon and now lives and works between the UK and Germany. She has an MSc in Applied Linguistics from Manchester University. Her work has been published in Ink Sweat and Tears, Magma, and The Poetry Review. Clementine’s first pamphlet, Radical Pairings, was published by Ignition Press in 2023.
Nadine El-Enany is a writer and poet. Her poetry has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Propel Magazine, 14 Magazine, fourteen poems, Gutter Magazine, Black Iris and Poetry Wales. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize and longlisted for the 2023 Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition and the 2022 Fish Poetry Prize.
Roshni Gallagher is a poet from Leeds living in Edinburgh. Her debut pamphlet Bird Cherry was published in 2023 by Verve Poetry Press. In 2022 she won an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She's currently studying for an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of St Andrews.
Amina Jama is a Somali writer, producer and curator from East London. Her work explores sonic resonances of archival materials, displacement, migration and community engagement. Her pamphlet, A Warning to the House that Holds Me, published by flipped eye press, received a 2020 Eric Gregory Award.
Christy Ku is a poet, actor and workshop facilitator. She’s worked with organisations including the BBC, Sky Arts, Science Museum, and the Barbican on projects such as poetry films, spoken word tracks and theatre shows. She founded BESEA Poets, a platform for British-based East and South-East Asian poets.
Ilisha Thiru Purcell is an award-winning Sri Lankan-Scottish poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. She was part of the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator Programme and was a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North. Her work has appeared in publications such as Bi+ Lines Anthology, Butcher’s Dog, and Third Space Anthology.
Wendelin Law writes about historical trauma, the oppression of women, and family stories. Her goal is to publish symbolic poetry books that act as reminders of humanitarian crises and social injustice. She is the co-winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2024.
Fae Wolfe lives in Manchester. She is pursuing a doctorate in counselling psychology and is interested in how storytelling emerges from the body. Her poems have appeared with The London Magazine, Aurora Prize for writing, Button Poetry, The Bitchin Kitsch, and Raising Mothers: Celebrating Black, Indigenous & Brown parenthood.
JAMES BERRY POETRY PRIZE 2024 SHORTLIST READING
James Berry Poetry Prize 2024, Wednesday 20 November 2024, 7pm (online)
Online event hosted by Bloodaxe Books and Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts
Readings by the six poets shortlisted for the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024, along with readings by the three commended poets.
You can watch the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize event live or later on the Bloodaxe Books YouTube channel, or via this link: https://youtube.com/live/HhuB8YR8b_4. Register for this free online reading via TicketTailor before noon on 19 November if you would like to receive reminder emails about the event: https://buytickets.at/bloodaxebooks/1403223.
The three equal winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 will be announced during this online event.
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The James Berry Poetry Prize
Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain’s first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Its joint organisers are Newcastle University and Bloodaxe Books.
The three equal winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 each receive year-long mentoring during 2024-25 plus £1000 and publication of their debut book length collections with Bloodaxe in 2026. The 2024 winning poets will be mentored by poets Patience Agbabi, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Jacob Sam-La Rose, one of the judges of the 2021 inaugural prize. There are five judges for the 2024 prize: Neil Astley, founding editor of Bloodaxe Books; poet Imtiaz Dharker, holder of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and Chancellor of Newcastle University; poet Theresa Muñoz, director of Newcastle Poetry Festival and James Berry Poetry Prize manager; Nathalie Teitler, diversity specialist and director of The Complete Works; and poet and professor Major Jackson, who holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in the US and has worked with Newcastle University on previous projects including Freedom City.
The winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021 were Kaycee Hill, who was mentored by Malika Booker; Marjorie Lotfi, mentored by Mimi Khalvati; and Yvette Siegert, mentored by Mona Arshi. Kaycee Hill’s debut collection, Hot Sauce, and Marjorie Lotfi’s The Wrong Person to Ask were published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2023. The debut collection by the third winner, Yvette Siegert, will be published in 2026. Marjorie Lotfi's The Wrong Person to Ask was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It won the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 2024, one of the Forward Prizes, and is on the shortlist for Poetry Book of the Year in the Saltire Book Awards 2024.
The prize is part of an inclusivity project devised for Bloodaxe by Nathalie Teitler with Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo whose own debut poetry book Lara is published by Bloodaxe. The prize is named in honour of James Berry, OBE (1927-2017), one of the first black writers in Britain to receive wider recognition. He emigrated from Jamaica in 1948, and took a job with British Telecom, where he spent much of his working life until he was able to support himself from his writing. He rose to prominence in 1981 when he won the National Poetry Competition.
James Berry's numerous books included two seminal anthologies of Caribbean-British poetry, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (Chatto & Windus, 1981), and A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), drawing on five earlier collections including Windrush Songs (2007), published to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. James also inspired and helped younger poets who came after him, most notably Raymond Antrobus and Hannah Lowe who returned the favour by giving him their personal support in his later years. The winners and shortlisted poets will also receive copies of James Berry’s books from Bloodaxe.
Sharing a commitment with Bloodaxe Books to diversify the UK poetry sector, Newcastle University has previously worked with Bloodaxe on other projects relating to the promotion of poets of colour, such as Freedom City in 2017, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr being awarded an honorary doctorate by Newcastle University, including the publication of a celebratory anthology, The Mighty Stream: poems in celebration of Martin Luther King, and Out of Bounds, a national project promoting the work of poets of colour based around on another anthology co-published by Newcastle University with Bloodaxe.
The James Berry Poetry Prize builds on the legacy of the ten-year Complete Works mentoring scheme founded by Bernardine Evaristo and managed by Nathalie Teitler with funding from Arts Council England. The Complete Works scheme was devised to redress the low proportion of publications by poets of colour in the UK identified in the Arts Council’s Free Verse report (2005) on diversity in British poetry publishing which Bernardine Evaristo herself initiated. An anthology featuring the work of all 30 poets, Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets, edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf and Nathalie Teitler, was published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2023.
NCLA received special funding from Arts Council England to run the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize as a pilot project in partnership with Bloodaxe Books. The 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize is supported by an uplift in Bloodaxe’s Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation funding for 2023-26 designated for inclusivity projects.
Run in partnership with Newcastle University, the prize is free to enter and open to Black and minority ethnic poets who have not published a book-length collection, with special consideration given to LGBTQ+/disabled poets and poets from underrepresented backgrounds. Entries for the 2024 prize were open from 15 April to 31 July 2024.
More information about the James Berry Poetry Prize can be found here.
[05 November 2024]
