Wordsworth Grasmere, Jerwood Centre, Dove Cottage, Grasmere LA22 9SH
Saturday 18 March 2023, 13:00 – 16:00
The annual Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition has launched the careers of many successful poets. This year the winners of the 2021 and 2022 competitions will give readings in the atmospheric setting of the book-lined Reading Room in the Jerwood Centre at Wordsworth Grasmere.
The four winning poets of the 2021 competition were selected by Daljit Nagra and Pascale Petit and are Dean Browne for his pamphlet Kitchens at Night, Jim McElroy for his pamphlet We are the Weather, Maya C Popa for her pamphlet Dear Life, and Anastasia Taylor-Lind for her collection One Language.
The four winning poets of the 2022 competition were selected by Jonathan Edwards and Romalyn Ante and are Karen Downs-Barton for her pamphlet Didicoy, Jon Miller for his pamphlet Past Tense Future Imperfect, Zoë Walkington for her pamphlet I hate to be the one to tell you this, and Luke Samuel Yates for his collection Dynamo.
This event will include an interval with free tea and coffee. There will be the opportunity to purchase signed copies of the winning pamphlets directly from the Poetry Business (cash only). These readings will be recorded and made available after the event.
Although this event is free, spaces are limited and we recommend booking a ticket in advance.
About the poets
Dean Browne is from Co. Tipperary, Ireland. His poems have been published widely in magazines and journals, including Banshee, Bath Magg, Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Southword, The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine and The Well Review. He is a winner of the Cuisle National Poetry Competition (2011) and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (2021). In 2015 his poem ‘Tabernacle’ opened the special Irish issue of Poetry magazine and in 2019 ‘Pine Box in the Flea Market’ was shortlisted for Poem of the Year in the Irish Book Awards. Having previously lived in Berlin, Dean now once again calls Cork City home.
Jim McElroy is 2021 winner of the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing and the 2020 Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award. In 2019 he was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions, runner-up in the Bridport Poetry Award and awarded an Individual Artist Award by Arts Council NI. He has been shortlisted for the 2021 Gutter, Edwin Morgan Award, the 2020 Rialto pamphlet Award, Bridport Poetry Award, Cúirt New Writing prize, was runner-up in the Fingal Poetry Prize and nominated for the Pushcart and Forward prizes.
Maya C Popa is the author of American Faith (Sarabande Books; recipient of the 2020 North American Book Prize), as well as two chapbooks. Her writing appears in The Paris Review, Poetry, The TLS, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of awards in the US and UK, including the Editor’s Prize from the Poetry Foundation and the Martin Starkie Prize from the Oxford Poetry Society. Popa serves as Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches at NYU and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Oxford University, where she was a Clarendon Scholar, NYU, and Barnard College and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is an English/Swedish photojournalist covering issues relating to women, war and violence. She is a National Geographic Magazine photographer, a TED fellow and a 2016 Harvard Nieman fellow. She writes poems about contemporary conflicts and the experiences she cannot photograph.
Karen Downs-Barton is an award-winning Anglo-Romani writer. After a peripatetic early life including times in state child care she is now based in Wiltshire. Karen is a PhD candidate at Kings College London writing a magic realist poetry collection set in a metropolitan revue bar. Her work has been widely anthologised and appeared in magazines including Tears in the Fence; The High Window; Rattle; Ink, Sweat and Tears; and The North amongst others.
Jon Miller lives near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands and has recently stopped teaching to concentrate on his writing. His poetry has been published in a range of literary magazines and anthologies and he has also indulged in reviews and literary criticism. He was short-listed for the Wigtown Poetry Prize in 2021. His pamphlet ‘still life’ was published by Sandstone Press and a further pamphlet was published in an installation/exhibition in collaboration with the artist Peter White entitled ‘Echo’.
Zoë Walkington lives with her whippets in Woburn Sands in Bedfordshire. She is a psychologist at the Open University, specialising in the psychology of police investigations. She regularly advises the police on interviewing suspects, and acts as an academic advisor to the BBC on factual crime content. She has had poetry published in Hinterland, Strix, and The North magazines. She is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing.
Luke Samuel Yates was born and lives in North-West England. A four times Poetry Society Foyle Young Poet, he was selected for the Aldeburgh Eight and has published two previous pamphlets, The Pair of Scissors that Could Cut Anything (The Rialto, 2012) and The Flemish Primitives (a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition 2015). His work has appeared in magazines such as Poetry Wales, Ambit, The North, The Rialto, The Moth, Spelt, Finished Creatures, Poetry Salzburg Review, some anthologies of ‘new’ poets, and on the London Underground. He has performed work on Radio 4, at Aldeburgh, Ledbury, Kendal Calling and Carefully Planned festivals, and from inside a wooden box suspended from the ceiling of the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study, where he held a residency in 2009. A lecturer in Sociology, he also teaches and writes about political movements, consumption and everyday life.