Toutoungi wins Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections

Claudine Toutoungi has won the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections, with her "offbeat and utterly original" Two Tongues (Carcanet). 

The £5,000 prize was set up on 2019 and is the only poetry award in the UK for second collections. The 2021 winner was announced in an online ceremony with readings from the shortlisted collections and announcements by Sandeep Parmar and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Judge Sandeep Parmar said: “Debut collections are often feted, and this prize was of course established to bring a rigorous attention to what a poet does next—what risks might they take unfettered by a first outing? How might they re-imagine voice, a book’s shape, syntax, language, form—all those tools that make the poet’s lifelong work possible.

"Claudine Toutoungi’s Two Tongues is often hilarious, frequently offbeat and utterly original. Her control of language, her wit, her dexterity of line and image, all these things make for a poet who feels well beyond a second collection. She revolves around her subjects with a maturity and elegance that isn’t afraid to step into the lyric spotlight but that rarely does more often what we see in Toutoungi is a masterclass in language and form, a sense of adventure and willingness to risk, in a voice that is brimming with intelligence and humour.”

Toutoungi saw off competition from a shortlist including Horse-Man by Em Strang (Shearsman Books), melt by Sarah Hymas (Waterloo Press), After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou (Penned in the Margins), Tigress by Jessica Mookherjee (Nine Arches Press), The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here by Vidyan Ravinthiran (Bloodaxe Books) and Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Bloodaxe Books).

She grew up in Warwickshire and studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford. After a Masters at Goldsmiths, she trained as an actor and worked as a BBC radio drama producer and English teacher. As a dramatist, her plays "Bit Part" and "Slipping" have been produced by the Stephen Joseph Theatre. She adapted "Slipping" for BBC Radio 4, after it was featured in an international reading series at New York’s Lark Play Development Centre. Other work for BBC Radio includes "Deliverers" and "Home Front". 

She said of her second collection: “Anyone who’s launched a book over this last strange period has probably had that weird, disembodied feeling of not quite knowing the effect their work has had on people, so to get this sudden positive signal was tremendous. I’ve always been interested in shape-shifting, both emotional and linguistic. I grew up between languages. And in this new book (the title of which is a lie: there aren’t two tongues, there are at least six) sounds, dialects, other languages, and all kinds of vocal slippages run amok. My acoustic sense might also stem from being partially sighted and relying more on sounds than on visual acuity to navigate the world. 

"But whatever’s to blame, I’m hopeful the resulting poems feel both playful and also take on the confusions and collisions of our world in interesting ways. There’s a phrase Paul Durcan uses in one of his poems which is ‘slapstick loneliness’. It’s a brilliant way of summing up the tragicomedy of existence, and I’d like to hope that those twin sides to the coin— sadness and merriment are woven together in Two Tongues.”

Ledbury Poetry Festival’s artistic director Chloe Garner said: “Ledbury Poetry Festival is deeply grateful to the Pennington Mellor Munthe Charity Trust for supporting this valued Prize that uniquely celebrates the evolution of a poet's voice beyond their, often more visible, debut. It can be easier to begin and harder to continue. The goal of this prize, as with so much of Ledbury Poetry Festival’s work, is to nourish and fortify poets so they can grow and flourish.”