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Literary magazine Poetry London has launched a Pamphlet Prize, which will publish the work of emerging poets via Poetry London Editions, the magazine’s new imprint, and has announced plans to appoint a new editorial board consisting of six advisers.
The Pamphlet Prize will run alongside Poetry London’s annual Poetry Prize, an award for a single outstanding poem, which is judged this year by Rachel Long. The inaugural edition of the Pamphlet Prize is being judged by Jay Bernard. Bernard’s debut collection, Surge (Chatto & Windus), won the Ted Hughes Award (2017) and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award (2020). Poetry London Editions is set to publish three pamphlets per year starting in 2024 and plans to expand to publishing full collections within the next two years.
Poetry editor André Naffis-Sahely said: “Poetry London Editions will publish pamphlets and book-length collections by emerging talents and established authors, honouring the magazine’s legacy of creating a space where leading voices showcase their most experimental work alongside less established writers. It will be committed to empowering, and uplifting racially and ethnically marginalized writers and we will publish books that deal with issues of migration, economic injustice and freedom of speech, introducing our audiences to poetry of the highest level that also addresses the most pressing issues of our times. We are currently assembling our list of pamphlets and full-length collections, which we will aim to roll out in 2024 and 2025.”
The new board will contribute to the team’s editorial content, support the magazine’s growth and development strategy, and facilitate collaborations across the literary landscape.
Incumbent editorial board members include Fred D’Aguiar, author of Letters to America (Carcanet, 2020) and professor of English at UCLA; Meena Kandasamy, author of The Orders Were to Rape You (Navayana, 2021); Camille Ralphs, author of After You Were, I Am (Granta, forthcoming) and Poetry editor at the TLS; Niall Campbell, author of Noctuary (Bloodaxe, 2019) and winner of the Poetry London Prize 2013; Romalyn Ante, author of Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus, 2020) and winner of the Poetry London Prize 2018; and Declan Ryan, author of Crisis Actor (Faber & Faber, forthcoming).
Naffis-Sahely continued: “Fred, Meena, Camille, Niall, Declan and Romalyn are joining the magazine at an incredibly exciting time and we are incredibly lucky to be able to work with them. It’s only natural for Poetry London to enter the publishing business given that the group of poets who founded this magazine in 1988 – including Moniza Alvi and Pascale Petit – took their inspiration from an earlier publication called Poetry London, it’s almost impossible not to recall the brilliant list of titles issued by that magazine’s editor, the Tamil poet Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu (1915–1983).
"In fact, although few remember his legacy, Tambimuttu published some of the 20th century’s most original and uncompromising books, including Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It’s a lot to live up to, but we’re determined to rise to the challenge.”
This year also sees the endowment of the new Poetry London Annual Lecture, which is presented in collaboration with the T S Eliot Foundation and Goldsmiths University. The new Lecture series will commission the world’s leading poets to give a reading of their poetry, as well as a talk on the general subject of poetry. The 2023 lecture will be given by Alice Notley. The lecture will be held in the Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG02 at Goldsmiths University at 7 p.m. on Wednesday 11th October, 2023.