Caroline Bergvall, Sasha Dugdale, Philip Gross and Paula Meehan have been presented with the 2017 Cholmondeley Prize on 20 June. Funded by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966, the prize is £2000 for each writer, awarded for their accomplished oeuvre and distinguished contribution to poetry.The assessors this year are Paul Farley, Rod Mengham and Pascale Petit.
Caroline Bergvall is a London-based poet, artist, and performer. Her poetry has been widely anthologised and presented. Pascale Petit comments that her latest collection, Drift, is 'spellbinding an dexperimental, taking language to strange limits, while engaging with one of the most pressing concerns of our time: migration'.
Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, Sasha Dugdale has published three poetry collections. She also translates Russian poetry and plays. Mimi Khalvati prizes Dugdale's poetry as 'ideally demonstrating how poetry in English can be heightened and emboldened by being inflicted by other languages and cultures'.
Philip Gross is a poet, fiction writer, and radplaywright. Winner of T. S. Eliot Prize (2009), he experiments on the interrelations between silence and speech in his poetry which also stems from his Quaker beliefs. The reader is enchanted by 'his acute acts of seeing and his boundless verbal imagination' in his poetry (Mimi Khalvati).
Author of seven collections of poetry and many awards, Paula Meehan also writes plays for children and adults. Her most recent collection, Geomantic, came out in 2016 and was published by Dedalus Press. Writing on wide-ranging subjects, Meehan still 'manages to be utterly down-to-earth and yet incantatory'(Pascale Petit).