This year the Ginkgo Prize is proud to be partnering with the Southbank’s iconic Poetry International Festival. The 2023 Festival from Friday 21 to Sunday 23 July marks the event’s triumphant return to the Southbank since it was last held in 2019.
Funded by the Edward Goldsmith Foundation and organised by the Poetry School, this award offers an £8000 prize along with writer's residencies to the winning candidate. This award, previously known as the Resurgence Prize was first presented in 2015 to a Filipina-American poet named Luisa Igloria, and in 2022 was presented to Lee Stockdale. With free writing workshops and a series of incisive essays, the Poetry International Festival allows the celebration of a diverse range of poetry.
This year, the longlist includes:
- Lydia Benson with ‘Midday Dungeness’
- Yvonne Reddick with ‘Burning Season’,
- Charlie Druce with ‘Hounslow Swifts’
- Anthony Lawrence with ‘Red Veined Darter’
- Cath Drake with ‘Wadjemup / Rottnest Island’
- David Canning with ‘The Bowland Sheep’
- Judith Rawnsley with ‘Dragon, Komodo National Park’
- Anastasia Taylor-Lind with ‘Kharkiv Zoo’
- Ute Kelly with ‘Notes Towards a Poem on Earthworms’
- Victoria Gatehouse with ‘Rainforest in a Shoebox’
- Caleb Parkin with ‘19 Gigabecquerels’
- Grant Clauser with ‘NASA Announces Plans for a Peopled Mission to Mars’
- Claire Collison with ‘A Bumper Year for Medusas’
- Freya Bantiff with ‘After the Bleaching’
- Rachel Bower with ‘Artificial Light at Night (ALAN)’
- Andre Bagoo with ‘Dungeness’
- Oluwaseun Olayiwola with ‘Endurance’
- Milena Williamson with ‘Echolocation (1943)’
- Sarah Doyle with ‘Sea Gooseberries’
- Rebecca Hawkes with ‘The Myxomycetes Dream’
- Kevin Graham with ‘On Mutability’
- Maria Howard with ‘The House of Water’
- Vivian Faith Prescott with ‘Sonnet For Our Salmon’
- Genevieve Carver with ‘Laboratory Samples Fulmar’
- Ciaran McDermott with ‘Women Gathering Mushrooms’
- Adrie Rose with ‘I will write a love poem’
The Ginkgo Prize ceremony will take place on Friday 21 July at 6 pm (BST) in the Purcell Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with readings from this year’s prize winners and the fantastic judges – Linda Gregerson, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Seán Hewitt. Tickets are available to buy here.