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James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 winners announced
The winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 for emerging writers of colour have been named as Clementine Ewokolo Burnley, Nadine El-Enany and Roshni Gallagher. The poetry prize offers both mentoring and book publication by Bloodaxe Books.
The three equal winners of the second James Berry Poetry Prize will each receive year-long mentoring during 2024 to 2025, a £1,000 prize and publication of their début book-length collections with Bloodaxe Books in 2026. The prize is run by Newcastle University in partnership with Bloodaxe Books.
The winners were announced at an online event on 20th November in which all six shortlisted poets and three commended poets took part. The event was hosted by two of the judges, Theresa Muñoz, poet and Newcastle Poetry Festival Director, and Imtiaz Dharker, holder of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and Chancellor of Newcastle University. The other judges were Bloodaxe Books founder and editor Neil Astley, diversity and inclusion specialist Nathalie Teitler and poet and professor Major Jackson. The shortlisted and commended poets were chosen from almost 100 entries from all over the UK.
Burnley, whose work was described by Teitler as "incredibly rich" and "explores the diasporic experience in which song, gesture and ritual take centre stage" was born in Cameroon and now lives and works between the UK and Germany. She said: "I’m overjoyed to jointly win this prize and to have the luxury of a mentor’s support as I shape my first book-length collection. And to be published by Bloodaxe. It all feels unreal. Thank you Newcastle University, I know how much hard work and commitment goes into initiatives like these."
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El-Enany won the Newcastle University Chancellor’s Poetry Prize 2024, announced at Newcastle Poetry Festival in May. She said: "James Berry’s poetry makes me feel less alone in the world. It embodies the anguish of displacement, poverty and oppression wrought by colonialism, but also carries a defiance, a refusal to let the violence he, his family and ancestors endured take from him his imagination, dreams and unique form of creative self-expression. To have won a prize named for him is an immense honour and gives me courage in pursuing my own creative purpose in a world that feels increasingly painful and frightening."
Of her work, Jackson said: "The poems of Nadine El-Enany gorgeously anticipate her readers who wait at the ends of her utterances, desirous of consolation, we ‘who look hard for ourselves in each other’. A bracing social consciousness melds with a lyric transparency that make these poems supple enough to startle readers to that place where ‘only new things happen’. So many entries felt deserving of their own recognition, more evidence of poetry’s vibrancy and relevance."
Gallagher is from Leeds and now lives in Edinburgh. In 2022 she won an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and is studying for an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of St Andrews. She said: "I’m absolutely delighted to be one of this year’s award winners. I’ve been slowly working towards this collection and I’m thrilled to get to work on it now with the attention and guidance of a mentor. I’m moved that this award is in honour of James Berry and I’m forever grateful and inspired by all the British-Caribbean poets that have come before me."
Dharker added: "This is a poetry that encompasses erased histories and sweeps of geography but still honours the specific body, the exact moment, teeming life under the stone. With sharp observation and merciless precision, Roshni Gallagher wrings the truth out of silence. In a year of outstanding entries, it’s good to think there are such varied and exciting voices to look forward to."
