The James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain’s first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication by Bloodaxe Books for young or emerging poets of colour. The three equal winners of the second James Berry Poetry Prize will each receive year-long mentoring during 2024-25, a £1000 prize, and publication of their debut book-length collections with Bloodaxe Books in 2026.
The winners were announced at an online event on 20 November in which all six shortlisted poets and three commended poets took part. This was hosted by two of the judges, Theresa Muñoz, poet and Newcastle Poetry Festival Director, and Imtiaz Dharker, holder of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and Chancellor of Newcastle University. The other judges were Bloodaxe Books founder and editor Neil Astley, diversity and inclusion specialist Nathalie Teitler, and poet and professor Major Jackson, who holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in the US and has worked with Newcastle University on previous projects. The shortlisted and commended poets were chosen from almost 100 entries from all over the UK.
Clementine Ewokolo Burnley was born in Cameroon and now lives and works between the UK and Germany. Her work has been published in Ink Sweat and Tears, Magma and The Poetry Review. Clementine’s first pamphlet, Radical Pairings, was published by Ignition Press in 2023. Of the prize, she said: ‘I’m overjoyed to jointly win this prize and to have the luxury of a mentor's support as I shape my first book-length collection. And to be published by Bloodaxe. It all feels unreal. Thank you Newcastle University, I know how much hard work and commitment goes into initiatives like these.’
Of her work, judge Nathalie Teitler stated: ‘Clementine Ewokolo Burnley is a powerful new voice in British poetry. Her work explores what she describes as “persistent displacement”, a body in a state of perpetual crossings. Her incredibly rich poetry explores the diasporic experience in which song, gesture and ritual take centre stage.’
Nadine El-Enany won the Newcastle University Chancellor’s Poetry Prize 2024 announced at Newcastle Poetry Festival in May. Her poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Poetry Wales, And Other Poems and Under the Radar. She is author of (B)ordering Britain: Law, race and empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021), and co-editor of After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (Pluto Press, 2019).
Of the prize, she states: ‘James Berry’s poetry makes me feel less alone in the world. It embodies the anguish of displacement, poverty and oppression wrought by colonialism, but also carries a defiance, a refusal to let the violence he, his family and ancestors endured take from him his imagination, dreams and unique form of creative self-expression. To have won a prize named for him is an immense honour and gives me courage in pursuing my own creative purpose in a world that feels increasingly painful and frightening.'
Of her work, Major Jackson said: ‘The poems of Nadine El-Enany gorgeously anticipate her readers who wait at the ends of her utterances, desirous of consolation, we “who look hard for ourselves in each other”. A bracing social consciousness melds with a lyric transparency that make these poems supple enough to startle readers to that place where "only new things happen". So many entries felt deserving of their own recognition, more evidence of poetry’s vibrancy and relevance.’
Roshni Gallagher is from Leeds and now lives in Edinburgh. In 2022 she won an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She's currently studying for an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of St Andrews. Gallagher said: ‘I'm absolutely delighted to be one of this year's award winners! I've been slowly working towards this collection and I'm thrilled to get to work on it now with the attention and guidance of a mentor. I'm moved that this award is in honour of James Berry, and I'm forever grateful and inspired by all the British Caribbean poets that have come before me.’
Imtiaz Dharker stated: ‘This is a poetry that encompasses erased histories and sweeps of geography but still honours the specific body, the exact moment, teeming life under the stone. With sharp observation and merciless precision, Roshni Gallagher wrings the truth out of silence. In a year of outstanding entries, it’s good to think there are such varied and exciting voices to look forward to.’
The 2024 winning poets will be mentored by poets Patience Agbabi, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Jacob Sam-La Rose, one of the judges of the 2021 inaugural prize.
The prize is generously funded this year by Bloodaxe Books covered by uplift in its Arts Council grant specifically for inclusivity projects and run in partnership with Newcastle University. The prize is part of an inclusivity project devised for Bloodaxe by Nathalie Teitler with Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo whose own debut poetry book Lara is published by Bloodaxe. It is named in honour of James Berry, OBE (1927-2017), one of the first black writers in Britain to receive wider recognition. He emigrated from Jamaica in 1948, and took a job with British Telecom, where he spent much of his working life until he was able to support himself from his writing. He rose to prominence in 1981 when he won the National Poetry Competition.
The prize first ran in 2021. The inaugural winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize were Kaycee Hill, who was mentored by Malika Booker, whose collection Hot Sauce was published by Bloodaxe in 2023; Marjorie Lotfi, who was mentored by Mimi Khalvati, and whose collection The Wrong Person to Ask (2023) won the 2024 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection from the Forward Arts Foundation; and Yvette Siegert, whose debut collection is due out in 2026.