Kim Moore wins Geoffrey Faber prize

Kim Moore has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for her poetry collection The Art of Falling (Seren Books).

The award was set up in memory of Geoffrey Faber, the founder and first chairman of Faber, and is awarded to poetry and prose in alternate years.

The judges for this year's award, Gillian Clarke, Tom Gatti and Katharine Towers, said that Moore's collection "undertakes and sustains a compelling engagement with language" from "the first line of the first poem".

"Her memorable image-making allows nothing to be ordinary, and her lines sing with the beauty of the familiar made startlingly new," the judges said. "Few write as well as Moore of the limitations and transformations of the body. The physicality of her verse runs – fresh, funny and fearful – through this collection, whether singing a psalm for bare-chested scaffolders, teaching the trumpet or undoing a boxer’s punches."

To win the £1,500 prize, the work has to be first published during the two years preceding the year in which the award is given.

Moore lives in Barrow, Cumbria. Her poems have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. The Art of Falling (Seren) is her debut collection.

Last year’s winner was Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume (William Heinneman).