Created in 1992, the Forward Poetry Prize is an important poetry award in the UK to reward outstanding English-speaking poets. The prize is sponsored by content marketing firm Bookmark, while the Prize for Best Poetry collection is sponsored by the Legacy Foundation of British poet and publisher Felix Dennis. The Forward Prize for Best Collection, The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, and The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in Memory of Michael Donaghy), the winner of the three awards, will receive prizes of £10,000, £5,000 and £1,000 respectively.
According to the British "Guardian", the highest prize in 2021 will be spent by the British poet Luke Kennard. In 2007, his work "The Harbour Beyond The Movie" was nominated for the Forward Poetry Award. The jury believed that Kennard was awarded for his "anarchic" response to Shakespeare's sonnets. Kennard's Notes on the Sonnets is a collection of poems in response to Shakespeare's famous passages, published in 2021 by small publisher Penned in the Margins. In the book, Kennard freely rewrites Shakespeare's 154 sonnets against the backdrop of a "boring family gathering."
The judges noted that Kennard's imaginative creation "perfectly reveals the unpleasant elements of human interaction and the fact that the essence of love lies in fluidity." "It is a warm invitation to change the dry connection between our times and Shakespeare's work, making this connection vivid and profound." Many contemporary students often feel forced to study Shakespeare's poetry." Kennard said the entire collection of poems stemmed from an opening poem he wrote at a party, "and I quickly became obsessed with writing a response to Shakespeare's 154 poems."
British poet Luke Kennard, image from The Guardian.
Another British Nigerian writer, Caleb Fermi, won a £5,000 prize for his poetry collection Poor. Born in 1990, the young poet moved with his family from his native Nigeria to London, England, at the age of 7 to study and write in North Peckham. Poor, his first collection of poems, embodies a strong sense of reality, and Fermi says he hopes to use the poetry to "shed light on my life in North Pekkam and explore how social policies affect the living conditions of the working class."
The £1,000 single poem award was won by poet Nicole Sealy for her poem Pages 22–29. an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure. Judges argued the poem used a "suffocating confusion" to describe the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by members of the Ferguson, Missouri, revealing "everything the report tried to hide." At the same time, it embodies that "all kinds of documents around us — reports, archives — can be embedded in poetry."
James Naughtie, president of this year's jury, said the winning work showed that "the imagination of poetry is not entirely 'introspective', although it is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people ... It touches on every aspect of our outer lives – our hopes and fears, our communities, and the wider world... The award-winning poets find a way to reach the deepest human feelings, while also exploring how to bring the reader to a suitable position to see the world around them in a different way."
Reference Links:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/24/luke-kennard-wins-forward-poetry-prize-for-anarchic-response-to-shakespeare-notes-on-the-sonnets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_Prizes_for_Poetry
https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry-2/forward-prizes-in-conversation-with-luke-kennard/
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