The winners of the 2011 Cardiff International Poetry Competition were announced at a celebratory event in Cardiff on Wednesday 20 July.
Following a lively open-top bus tour of Cardiff, which featured performances from local poets Ifor Thomas and Peter Finch, the winners were announced at Harry Ramsden’s Restaurant. Whilst enjoying world famous fish and chips and impressive views over Cardiff Bay, competition judge and TS Eliot Prize winner Philip Gross revealed the names of the eight winners who walked away with a total combined prize of £6,000.
First Prize of £5,000 was awarded to Malcolm Watson from Hull for his poem The Naked Quaker and the Burning Boy. In their adjudication competition judges Don Paterson and Philip Gross described Malcolm’s poem as “…a witty, sharp – and for all its ludic excess – rather profound meditation on what passes, and what is forgotten…The poem seemed to grow and change with every reading, a sure sign that its parts are connected to one another in sophisticated, fascinating and rich ways”.
Malcolm Watson was born in Annfield Plain, a pit village in County Durham, and is now an artist living in Hull. He has been widely anthologised and has won prizes in many competitions, most recently, winning commendations in the National Poetry Competitions of 2006 and 2008 and in the English Association Fellows’ Prize 2007. Malcolm has also won First Prize in the Basil Bunting Poetry Awards in 2010, and First Prize in the Stafford Poetry Competition 2011.
Ecologist, PhD physicist and Royal Literary Fund Fellow Mario Petrucci from London was awarded Second Prize of £500 for his poem hornets. Mario is a multi-award-winning poet and residency frontiersman, the only poet to have been resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. Third Prize of £250 was awarded to Richard Halperin from Paris for his poem The Animals All Knew, Without Saying which the judges described as “…a poem whose own idiom seemed to deepen as it pursues its strange logic; it wasn’t a pleasant place to be, perhaps, but it was a dramatically compelling one, with an atmosphere that was very hard to shake off”.
The five equal runners-up in the competition each receiving £50 were: Nina Boyd from Huddersfield; Rishi Dastidar from London; Mary O’Donnell from County Kildare; Lesley Saunders from Slough and Karen McCarthy Woolf from London.
Lleucu Siencyn, Acting Chief Executive for Literature Wales, said “We are delighted to welcome so many of the winning poets from this year’s competition to Cardiff to receive their awards. The competition has once again seen eight worthy winners chosen by esteemed judges who have set the standards high. With the continued support of Cardiff Council we look forward to receiving many more entries and welcoming poets from across the globe to Cardiff”.
The Cardiff International Poetry competition is administered by Literature Wales and supported by Cardiff Council. The 2012 competition will be launched in September this year. Full details will be available on the Literature Wales website in due course.
For more information on the 2011 or 2012 competitions contact Literature Wales on
029 2047 2266 / [email protected] or visit www.literaturewales.org/cipc/ where you can also read all of this year’s winning poems.
