Join us as Troubadour International Poetry Prize winners/commendeds Zoom in from Britain, Ireland, US, Canada & Australia along with judges, poets Mona Arshi (Cambridge) & Tom Sleigh (New York), for a celebratory prize-night reading on Tuesday March 26th!
Free online event, but Zoom numbers are limited. Advance booking only. Please book ASAP by emailing info@coffeehousepoetry.org for link.
First Prize, £2,000, Traceries, Jennifer Harrison, Windsor, Victoria, Australia
Second Prize, £1000, A child’s Christmas in alcohol, Simon Walsh, Brattleboro VT, USA
Third Prize, £500, Zebra haworthia, Jane Wilkinson, Norwich
This event is listed as 3 PM in EST, New York, USA. Please note additional time zone information:
8 PM GMT London, UK
7 AM EDT (GMT +11) Tasmania, Australia
Readings and judges' comments from this year's judges:
Mona Arshi worked as a Human Rights lawyer at Liberty before starting to write poetry: her collection, Small Hands, won the 2015 Forward Prize, her poems have featured in Poems on the Underground, she was recently commissioned to write a programme on The Odyssey for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week & she is Visiting Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge. Her latest poetry collection, Dear Big Gods (Pavilion Poetry, 2019), was followed by her debut novel, Somebody Loves You, in 2021.
Tom Sleigh’s ten poetry collections include House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed , and Paterson Poetry Prize winner The King’s Touch (Graywolf, 2022). He is the author of the essay collections The Land Between Two Rivers and Interview with a Ghost. A Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College (City University of New York), Tom lives in Brooklyn, and during the last ten years, has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya.