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