We begin another week with a look at the 2024 shortlist for the Forward Prize and the poet debuting their first play.
Forward Prize 2024 Shortlist
There are 20 poets who have been shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize for Poetry and they have been inspired by topics such as the responses to Ukraine and Gaze, toxic landlords and the opioid epidemic and even transgenerational memory for things like the miners strike.
The Forward prize is considered to be the more influential and coveted in the UK and Ireland. There are four different categories for the prize £10,000 for the Forward Prize for Best collection, £5000 for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First collection and £1000 each for the Forward Best Single Poem – Written, and the Jerwood prize for Best Single Poem – Performed. The shortlist was announced on 17th July. The winners will be announced during the opening ceremony of the Durham Book Festival which will be held on 10th October.
The judges have stated that this years shortlisted writers show an “astonishing breadth of styles and themes that contemporary poetry currently has to offer.” They were also thrilled with the calibre of the poetry that has reached the shortlist and the opportunity to showcase such strong writing.
The prize is well known for championing new voices in poetry as well as international writers and this year’s shortlist captures a real picture of the world today. Independent presses were also well represented on the shortlist with a total of 7 out of the 10 collections of poetry on the list published by smaller presses. There is also a strong presence for Scottish poetry this year with 3 out of 5 of the nominations for Best Single Poem – Performed, being performed by Scots, This is a relatively new award and marks a move from more “traditional” forms of poetry to the more contemporary.
The actor and poet Craig Charles is the chair of this year’s judging panel and he is joined by a number of other writers and poets.
Over the last three decades the Forward Prize has celebrated a huge number of incredibly well-known and successful poets including Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney and Caleb Femi.
Poet’s First Play Premieres
The debut play of Ellen Van Neerven, an Aboriginal Mumunjali Yugambeh writer, has just premiered with the Griffin Theatre Company. The play is called Swim and is something that van Neerven never thought they would write having never attended the theatre until their early 20s. The only access they had to books during their youth was those that were borrowed from the library.
Van Neerven was the winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2021 with “Throat,” a collection of poetry. In the same year they became only the third Indigenous person to have ever been awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry since its inception in 1980.
Swim tells the story of a genderfluid person of Aboriginal upbringings who is in their early 20s and makes their first visit to a local pool in many years. It looks at the issues of gendered changing rooms, fellow swimmers who are rude to them and memories of abuse years ago at the hands of a swimming teacher.
Writing the play has taken 5 years, 8 if the number of plays read by the writer in order to write their own script are taken into account.
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