The New Voice in Poetry Prize 2020
We are delighted to announce that the winner of the New Voice in Poetry Prize 2020 is Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa.
She will have her work recorded and published as part of The Soundscape Poetry Project and receives a £250 prize.
Judges this year were Tom Chivers (Director, Penned in the Margins), Jade Cuttle (Commissioning Arts Editor at The Times, poet and plant-whisperer) and Ross Sutherland (poet and podcaster).
On choosing Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa as their winner, the judges commented:
‘Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s poems are bursting with language. They capture the chaos of lived experience with power and originality. Everything in the worlds she conjures seems to be falling apart, but this heady, Technicolor mix is held together by precisely controlled image-making and a gripping delivery. Compelling, experimental, passionate – we were blown away.’
The NEW VOICE IN POETRY PRIZE is a new competition for emerging spoken word poets and performers who are yet to publish a full collection of work.
We launched the prize at the beginning of May 2020 and received almost 400 submissions from all corners of the UK.
This years’ other shortlisted poets were:
Emily Rose Galvin, Edward Green, Louise Morrisson and Millie Norman.
Information on the five shortlisted poets can be found here and all ten of their submitted audio poems can be streamed here