Competitions
 

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Recently I was delighted to win a place on the poets development scheme with Out Spoken Press and The Northern Writers Prize for Poetry.  Last summer I was offered the chance to join Billy Collins at a Poetry Hydraulics workshop at Southampton (NY) Writers conference.  

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On National Poetry Day this year, Gwyneth Lewis chose my poem My Father in his Coracle as the first runner up in The Poetry Society Stanza competition - on the theme of refuge. The PS have now nominated it for The Forward Prize for best Single Poem 2024.

 

I have also been highly commended in The Bridport (by Raymond Antrobus) with We Real Spinsters, The Live Canon (by Jennifer Wong) for The Fish Shack, Margate and The Cheshire Prize for Literature (by Daljit Nagra) for Three Lockdown Days.

 

The Trap-Bath Split and Strikes were listed by Glyn Maxwell in The AUB International and my poem Dharma Without Dogma in the Fish Poetry Prize by Billy Collins. I was shortlisted by Heidi Williamson in The Poetry Society Stanza for my poem, Hear Her Life and in the Hippocrates Prize for Comfort Always .

 

My pamphlet The Presence of Absence was highly commended in The Poetry Wales competition and was shortlisted by Will Harris in The Rialto Pamphlet Competition 2020.

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" Such an impressively sustained study of Alzheimer’s, which makes powerful use of a variety of forms. I found ‘Your Front Door’ a particularly affecting evocation of being “locked in / and locked out./ An alarm on both sides/ your wired sentry.” Little details – like the indented couplet in ‘The Avalon Plum Tree’ – carry such emotional heft. This is empathetic, “straight in the eye”, unsentimental but very moving writing." Will Harris.

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