We are delighted to announce the winners of our two annual poetry competitions! Click the links below to find out the results of the 2024 International Book & Pamphlet Competition and the 2024 New Poets Prize.

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Announcing the Winners of the 2024 International Book & Pamphlet Competition

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2024 International Book & Pamphlet Competition.

Congratulations to the two winners, chosen by Jane Clarke:

Caroline Bracken
for her collection Boy, Mother

and

Jen Feroze
for her collection A Dress With Deep Pockets

The Two Competition Runners-up are:

Dale Booton

and

Kate Rutter

Congratulations also to the Commended poets:

Ger Duffy
Matthew James Appleby
Derval Tubridy

Judge’s Comments

Reading the entries for this year’s Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition was thrilling because of the richness and diversity of entries. It was a privilege to select from such a consistently high standard of work and I’m happy to present these winning, runner-up and highly commended collections, all of which ignite the heart, mind and imagination.
– Jane Clarke

Caroline Bracken

For Boy, Mother

Boy/Mother is a deeply moving exploration of a mother’s relationship with her son who has a long-term mental illness. In innovative forms the poems evoke the day-to-day depredations of illness, psychiatric treatment and societal attitudes and yet the thread that runs through the collection is love. – Jane Clarke

Caroline Bracken‘s poems have been published in The North, Poetry Wales, Poetry News, Gutter, New England Review, the Irish Times, the Honest Ulsterman, Belfield Literary Review, Poetry Jukebox and elsewhere. She won the 2023 Renard Press Kinship Poetry Competition and has been a finalist in the Manchester Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Festival Poetry Contest and Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize. One of her poems has been nominated for the 2024 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by The Poetry Society UK. Her work has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and DLR Arts Office.

Jen Feroze

For A Dress With Deep Pockets

A lightness of touch combined with wit and insight distinguishes A Dress with Deep Pockets. The collection addresses themes of loss and change through memories of people and place and above all friendship. Here are poems that celebrate, offer solace and resonate far beyond the page. – Jane Clarke

Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. A former Foyle Young Poet, her work has appeared in publications including Poetry Wales, Under The Radar, Magma, The Interpreter’s House, And Other Poems, Berlin Lit and Butcher’s Dog. She placed second in the 2022/2023 Magma Editors’ Prize and was highly commended in the 2021 Spelt competition. Jen has edited anthologies for Black Bough Poetry and The Mum Poem Press, and her debut pamphlet Tiny Bright Thorns was published by Nine Pens in 2024.

Runners-Up

Dale Booton

Dale Booton (he/him) is a queer poet from Birmingham. His poetry is published by The North and Magma, and anthologised by Broken Sleep Books, Verve, Muswell Press, and Pan Macmillan. He has two pamphlets out: Walking Contagions (Polari Press) and On This Stretch of Queerland (Fourteen Poems).

Kate Rutter

Kate Rutter is an actor and poet. Her recent credits include Better for BBC, The Long Shadow for ITV and Truelove for Channel 4. Films she’s appeared in have won The Palme D’or, an Oscar and been nominated for BAFTAs. Her poems have been published in The Rialto, The North, Strix, Magma and several anthologies. She has been runner up in The Bridport Prize and in The Poetry Business, Mslexia (Bloodaxe) and Magma pamphlet competitions. Kate’s work as an actor informs her poems and her writing often emerges from where the two art forms meet. She lives in Sheffield.

About the International Book & Pamphlet Competition

The International Book & Pamphlet Competition was the first of its kind in Britain. Now in its 37^th year, it has launched the careers of many well-established and successful poets, including Daljit Nagra, Michael Laskey, Kim Moore, Pascale Petit, and Catherine Smith.

The winning collections are beautifully produced and promoted widely, and entered for all eligible awards and prizes. They are also sold in bookshops throughout the UK and through online stockists of The Poetry Business publications.

This year, the two winners have both been awarded a prize of £500 and will receive editorial support from The Poetry Business towards the publication of their winning pamphlets in Spring 2024. The two runners-up each receive an honorarium of £100.

The winners, runners-up and commended poets will all be invited to take part in an online reading and will be published in The North. A celebratory reading and prize-giving for the winning poets will be held at Wordsworth Grasmere in February 2025.

The 2024 Judge

Jane Clarke is the author of three poetry collections, The River (2015), When the Tree Falls (2019) and A Change in the Air (2023) published by Bloodaxe Books, as well as an illustrated chapbook, All the Way Home, published by Smith|Doorstop (2019). Jane received the Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award 2016, the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry 2016 and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award 2022. Her third collection A Change in the Air is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Poetry Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 and longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023. Jane lives with her wife in the uplands of Co. Wicklow.

Ann and Peter Sansom are directors of The Poetry Business and editors of The North magazine and Smith|Doorstop books. Ann’s publications include Romance and In Praise of Men & Other People (Bloodaxe) and Peter’s include Writing Poems (Bloodaxe) and Selected Poems (Carcanet).

Each and every year The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition discovers and publishes exciting and substantial new poets…There’s no doubt that this is a career-changing poetry competition. If you’ve got a solid body of work that you’re pleased to have written, there’s nowhere better to send it.
The Poetry Trust

One of the career milestones for very many poets of note
Anne-Marie Fyfe

I’ve judged a lot of contests, but I can’t recall any where the quality of the poems – one manuscript after another – was so high
Billy Collins, 2015 competition judge

Announcing the Winners of the 2024 New Poets Prize

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2024 New Poets Prize. Thank you to all entrants for letting us see your work, and congratulations to the two winners and two runners-up chosen by Holly Hopkins:

WINNERS

Jayant Kashyap
for his pamphlet Notes on Burials

Cia Mangat
for her pamphlet Lobe

RUNNERS-UP

Zelda Cahill-Patten
for her pamphlet Surgeon Songs

Charlie Jolley
for her pamphlet The Dreamers

These four poets will receive editorial and mentoring support from The Poetry Business, as well as publication in The North and a launch reading. The two winning pamphlets will be published in 2025 under the New Poets List – an imprint of The Poetry Business. The Poetry Business is extremely grateful to Arvon and to Arts Council England for their support.

The 2025 New Poets Prize will open for entries in Autumn 2024.

The Winners

Jayant Kashyap

for Notes on Burials

Jayant Kashyap’s Notes on Burials asks the reader to consider different types of burials and retrievals, including personal and etymological burials, in cool, reflective poems. – Holly Hopkins

Jayant Kashyap has published two previous pamphlets, Unaccomplished Cities (Ghost City Press, 2020) and Survival (Clare Songbirds, 2019), and a zine, Water (Skear Zines, 2021). He won the Young Poets International Competition (judged by Phoebe Stuckes) at the Wells Festival of Literature in 2021, and his poem ‘A Positively Violent Poem in Five Parts’ was a winner of the Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis challenge on Young Poets Network the same year and was later presented at COP26, the United Nations Climate Conference 2021. In 2021, he was also shortlisted for the New Poets Prize, and again in 2022. In 2022, one of his poems was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Anthology, and another in 2023. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in POETRY, Magma, Arc, Acumen and Poetry Wales.

Cia Mangat

for Lobe

Cia Mangat’s Lobe invites the reader into the lives of the speaker and their mother through carefully observed, thoughtful poems that resonate and shine. – Holly Hopkins

Cia Mangat is a poet from London. She founded and edited Zindabad, a zine for people in diasporas worldwide. Cia is an alumnus of Barbican Young Poets, Roundhouse Poetry Collective and the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. Her work has appeared in gal-dem, propel, and bath magg; Everything is going to be all right (2021, Orion); and Cerys Matthews’ album We Come From The Sun (Decca Records). Cia has read her poems at the Southbank Centre and on BBC radio, and facilitates writing and zine-making workshops.

The Runners-Up

Zelda Cahill-Patten

for Surgeon Songs

Zelda Cahill-Patten’s Surgeon Songs show verve and playfulness even as the speaker is confronted with illness and loss, creating a sense of courage and generosity to the reader. – Holly Hopkins

Zelda Cahill-Patten lives and works in London. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Magma, Sheila-Na-Gig and Ink Sweat & Tears. She has been awarded the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize (University of Oxford, for poetry in strict rhyming metre) and the Gertrude Hartley Poetry Prize (Balliol College). She studied English Literature at university, and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Charlie Jolley

for The Dreamers

Charlie Jolley’s The Dreamers demonstrates a talent for dramatic monologues which directs the reader to consider different moments in history and how they relate politically and emotionally. – Holly Hopkins

Charlie Jolley is a young poet and fiction writer. She is a top 15 winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award (2023). In 2023 she was also the winner of the Waltham Forest Young Poets Prize, the Hexham Young People’s Poetry Competition, and the Poem:99 Poetry Competition, as well as placing second in the East Riding Festival of Words, and the Charles Causley Young Poets Prize. She has been published by The Poetry Society, Zoetic Press, and in Hive anthologies Dear Life and After Hours. She is an alumnus of Sheffield Young Writers and a member of Hive Poetry Collective.

About the New Poets Prize

The New Poets Prize is a pamphlet competition for writers between the ages of 17 and 24 (inclusive). This prize was launched in 2015 and runs annually alongside the renowned Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition, which has now been established for 38 years. Previous judges of the New Poets Prize include Helen Mort, Andrew McMillan, Kayo Chingonyi, Mary Jean Chan, Luke Kennard and Kim Moore. Winners of the New Poets Prize have gone on to publish full-length collections with notable publishers, including Carcanet and Bloodaxe Books, have been appointed as workshop facilitators, editors-in-residence, and competition judges (such as the Forward Prizes), have launched and performed their pamphlets on national radio and at prestigious venues, and have been widely reviewed.

The Judge

Holly Hopkins is a poet and assistant editor at The Poetry Business. Holly’s first collection The English Summer (Penned in the Margins) ‘takes on the stories England tells about itself’. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Prize and won a Laurel Prize. It was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Special Commendation and was named one of The Guardian‘s ‘Best Poetry Books of 2022’. Work-in-progress, which will form Holly’s second collection, was awarded the Northern Writers Award for Poetry in 2023.