Export Zone commended

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, July 9, 2014 Under: Reality Street
Andrea Brady's poem "Export Zone", from her 2013 Reality Street collection Cut From the Rushes, has been Highly Commended by the judges of the 2014 Forward Prizes. You can download the poem here.

Famously, Jeremy Paxman headed the panel this year, but we suspect this commendation owes more to the influence of Vahni Capildeo, one of the panel members. Thanks, whoever it was.

This is the first time a Reality Street book has ever tickled the judges of any major poetry prize. We must admit we gave up trying many years ago for the Forward (and the T S Eliot), but were persuaded to enter Andrea's book as well as Peter Hughes' Allotment Architecture this year.

Welcome though this commendation is, we can't help noticing that the actual book prizes this year once again went to the usual narrow range of publishers: Picador, Cape, Carcanet, Faber, Chatto & Windus, Bloodaxe. Templar Poetry and Sceptre were the only others that got a look-in.

It's not clear what the status of the Highly Commended single poems is. Andrea's poem, along with all the other commended ones, will be published in an anthology later this year, in accordance with  the rules of the competition. There is no payment and no prize, and we haven't been able to discover what other poems have been selected - Forward Prizes were unable to tell us. They also confirmed that they were unable to provide complimentary tickets to the prizegiving - we will have to buy our own if we want to go.

In : Reality Street 

Next post: White zone and...
Previous post: let me tell you...

Tags: "andrea brady" "forward prizes for poetry" 
« Back to posts

blog comments powered by Disqus

About ...


Ken Edwards This blog is written by Ken Edwards, co-founder and editor/publisher of Reality Street, and it's mainly about the press. Ken's personal blog can now be found at http://www.kenedwardsonline.co.uk