Today’s poetry news roundup looks at the winner of the OCM Bocas Prize, the Robert Frost manuscript that is going up for auction and the winner of the Hebrew Poetry Prize.

OCM Bocas Prize 2021

Canisia Lubrin, St. Lucia born poet, has won this year”s OCM Bocas Prize for The Dyzgraphxst. The poem, which is book-length, was described by the judges as “postcolonial poetry at its best”. She takes away a prize of 10,000 USD.

The award, which is given for a piece of writing; poetry, a novel that has been penned by someone who is either Caribbean by birth or by citizenship. It was established in 2011 and the inaugural winner was Derek Walcott for his poetry collection “White Egrets”.

Canisia Lubrin is a poet, teacher and critic whose work is frequently anthologised, she has also been translated into both Italian and Spanish. The Dyzgraphxst has recently been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada and in 2021 Lubrin was the winner of the Windham Campbell Prize. She is currently a teacher at the University of Toronto and is due to start working as an editor at Penguin Random House shortly.

Copy of Frost Manuscript Goes up for Auction

A copy of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” the renowned poem by Robert Frost will be going up for auction next week. Described as a “fair copy”, written in the poet”s own hand, the manuscript is not the original but has been described as still being quite a rare item by the auctioneer.

The poem was written by Frost on a summer morning in 1922. He was at his home at the time in Shaftsbury, the building which is now the home to the Robert Frost Stone House Museum. It was published the following year as part of “New Hampshire” his award-winning Pulitzer Prize collection.

It is believed that the manuscript, which is undated, was written in the 1940s or 50s – this is based on the handwriting and also the colour of the ink. At the bottom of the copy are the words “For Miss Parson’s Room”, it is not quite known who this refers to but as Frost was a huge fan of visiting schools and groups it is suspected that the copy was written for a teacher he met.

The auction will also include a quotation written by Charles Dickens which dates to his American inaugural tour, in 1842.

The guide price for the Robert Frost manuscript was put at between $8,000 and $10,000, however, pre-auction bidding of $12,500 had been received by the end of 22^nd April. The pre-auction bidding for the item is open until 28^th April when the auction will go live.

The manuscript has come from the private collection of a medical writer who passed away in 1997.

Hebrew Poetry Prize 2021

The poet Shlomit Appel was awarded with the Hebrew Poetry Prize 2021. The prize was given in memory of President Reuven Rivlin’s late wife Nechama Rivlin. Her award-winning work was “Memories from the Swimsuit Factory.

The prize was set up in 2019 and is given for works written in Hebrew.