Shortlist for 2024 Moth Poetry Prize revealed

Four poems have been shortlisted for the 2024 Moth Poetry Prize with prospective winners including a California state trial judge and a Utah-based English professor.  

“Pencilling the Dates” by Catherine Ann Cullen, “And Other Mirages” by Jade Angeles Fitton, “Things I’m Against” by Lance Larsen and “Extinction Picnic” by Craig van Rooyen have all been nominated.  

Offering an overall prize pot of over €10,000 (£8,530) the award is solely sponsored by publishers of Moth magazine and is one of the world’s most valuable prizes for a single poem. 

The four-strong shortlist of unpublished poems was chosen by Hannah Sullivan, T S Eliot Prize-winner and associate professor of English at New College, Oxford.

Cullen is an inaugural poet in residence at Poetry Ireland and a children’s writer and songwriter, and author of seven books and an academic. Cullen’s poem “Pencilling the Dates” is, according to Sullivan, “a well-crafted and unsentimental piece of retrospection’ which takes a subject ‘which is already rare in poetry – early pregnancy loss – and examines it in hindsight, from the perspective of a mother and her young daughter, scrupulously attending to its enduring meaning”.

Fitton’s memoir Hermit was published by Hutchinson Heinemann last year and her journalism and short stories have been widely published. Based in Devon, she has been selected for “And Other Mirages” which offers “a quirky, slight, sideways look at a recent afternoon which begins and ends during an exercise class in a swimming pool, the present dilated between two songs from the golden age of pop,” Sullivan said. She added: “Fastening its attention to small, irregular things, like the bobbing ’wildflower’ swimming caps, the poem becomes an exercise in evacuating the ego.” 

Larsen grew up in Idaho and is now the prize-winning author of five poetry collections and a professor of English at Brigham Young University in Utah. His poem “Things I’m Against” is, according to Sullivan, a “perfectly-timed meditation in syllabics which “soon becomes much more than a charmingly odd list of deprecated things (rhubarb, hockey, suede shoes)”.  

Van Rooyen, who was born in Tennessee, is a state trial judge in California and an award-winning poet. His entry “Extinction Picnic” is “clever, questing and generous", says Sullivan, imagining "not only sitting down with long-dead ancestors, but comforting them like children”. She added: “A witty and soothing reminder to slow down, pack a picnic lunch, and look around us.” 

Sullivan also commended poems by Kate Fenwick, Victoria Gatehouse, Mary-Jane Holmes, Holly Hopkins, Cheryl Moskowitz, Eloise Rodger, Alison Carb Sussman and Imogen Wade, all of whom will receive prizes of €250 (£213). 

The overall winner, who will receive €6,000 (£5,122), will be announced at a live event on the Moth’s Instagram page at 6 p.m. on 11th April. The remaining three shortlisted poets will each receive €1,000 (£853). 

Additionally writer Joseph Coelho is judging The Caterpillar Poetry Prize, run by the Moth, which closes on 31st March, and entries are now also open for The Moth Short Story Prize 2024. The winners of each of the four annual Moth prizes are published in the Irish Times online, while the first prize-winner of The Moth Short Story Prize is printed in the magazine’s summer fiction series.  

For more details visit themothmagazine.com.