MSLEXIA & PBS WOMEN'S POETRY COMPETITIONS 2019
1st PRIZE: £2000 (plus optional mentorship and writing retreat) | 2nd: £400 | 3rd: £250 | 17 FINALISTS: £25 | UNPUBLISHED POET: £250
WINNING PRIZE: PAMPHLET PUBLICATION BY SEREN BOOKS & £250
Links
THE POETRY BOOK SOCIETY is a unique poetry book club founded by TS Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". In 2016, the PBS moved to Inpress in Newcastle and has since launched the redesigned Bulletin magazine, the Wild Card Choice to celebrate a more diverse range of poetry and co-founded
the Northern Poetry Symposium. The PBS is proud to showcase the best new contemporary poetry, including powerful female poets such as Sophie Collins and Sinéad Morrissey.
MSLEXIA is a registered charity dedicated to redressing the gender imbalance in publishing, primarily through a quarterly creative writing magazine for women, a programme of annual events, and a roster of prestigious competitions and awards. Established in 1999, Mslexia aims to provide a high-profile platform for both new and established voices. A quarterly masterclass in the business and psychology of writing, it’s the essential magazine for women who write. Mslexia is supported by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
ABOUT
The Poetry Book Society received 241 submissions from poetry publishers. The judging panel comprised poets Ian McMillan (Chair), Caroline Bird, Robert Crawford, representing New Generation Poets, Paul Farley, representing Next Generation Poets, and Clare Pollard. The judges selected poets who had published their first collection during the decade from 1st May 2004 to 30th April 2014.
The campaign set out to build the visibility and audiences of these poets, with a particular focus on reaching new readers. It included a national media campaign, a dedicated website featuring video interviews, poems, discussions and blogs, as well as a reading group scheme with discussion notes, poems and a competition.
2014 POETS
Tara Bergin
Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. She moved to England in 2002 and currently lives in North Yorkshire. In 2012 she completed her PhD research at Newcastle University on Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky. Her poems have been published in Poetry London, Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry Nation Review, as well as in Carcanet’s anthology New Poetries V. She was awarded the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry in 2014. This is Yarrow (Carcanet) is her first collection.
Emily Berry
Emily Berry grew up in London and studied English Literature at Leeds University and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. She works as a freelance writer and co-edits the
anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives and is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible, a compendium of breakfasts published by Bloomsbury. In 2008 she received an Eric Gregory Award and her first pamphlet stingray fevers was published by tall lighthouse. Dear Boy (Faber) was awarded the 2013 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Sean Borodale
Sean Borodale works as a poet and artist, making scriptive and documentary poems written on location; this derives from his process of writing and walking for works such as Notes for an Atlas (Isinglass, 2003) and Walking to Paradise (1999). He was selected for the Granta New Poets series in 2012 and his first collection of poetry, Bee Journal (Jonathan Cape, 2012), was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. His second collection, Human Work, is published in February 2015 by Jonathan Cape.
Adam Foulds
Adam Foulds was born in London and studied English at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is a poet and novelist and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton. In 2008, his first collection The Broken Word (Jonathan Cape) won the Costa Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. His novel The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the European Union Prize for Literature. He was named as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 2013.
Annie Freud
Annie Freud was born in London in 1948. Her father is the painter, Lucian Freud. Her maternal grandfather was the sculptor, Sir Jacob Epstein, and her great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud. Her first publication was A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose (Donut
Press). Her first full collection, The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007), was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and won the Dimplex Prize for New Writing (Poetry) in the same year. The Mirabelles was a PBS Choice and shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2010. She is currently teaching at the Poetry School.
Alan Gillis
Alan Gillis was born in Belfast and lives in Scotland where he is Lecturer in English at The University of Edinburgh. His debut collection, Somebody, Somewhere, won the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection in 2004, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His second collection Hawks and Doves was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007 and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Here Comes the Night was published by Gallery Press in 2010, and his fourth collection, Scapegoat, is published by Gallery Press in October 2014.
Rebecca Goss
Rebecca Goss was born and grew up in Suffolk. She has an MA in Creative Writing from
Cardiff University and taught Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University for
several years. Her first collection The Anatomy of Structures was published in 2010 by
Flambard Press. Her second collection Her Birth (Carcanet) was shortlisted for the 2013
Forward Prize for Best Collection. She is now a full-time writer and lives in Suffolk.
Jen Hadfield
Jen Hadfield lives in Shetland where she works as a poet and writing tutor. Her first collection Almanacs (Bloodaxe, 2005) was written in Shetland and the estern Isles in 2002. Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe), won the T S Eliot Prize in 2008.
She won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition in 2012, and her most recent collection is Byssus (Picador, 2013).
Emma Jones
Emma Jones was born in Sydney, Australia and studied at the universities of Sydney and Cambridge. Her first book, The Striped World, was published in 2009 and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Queenslan Premier's Literary Award for Best Collection and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2009-10 she was poet in residence at the Wordsworth Trust.
Luke Kennard
Luke Kennard is a poet and writer of fiction. He won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 for his first collection of prose poems, The Solex Brothers (Stride Books), and his second collection of poetry, The Harbour Beyond the Movie (Salt, 2007), made him the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. His criticism has appeared in Poetry London and The Times Literary Supplement, and his first fiction publication, Holophin (Penned in the Margins, 2012), won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2013.
Melissa Lee-Houghton
Melissa Lee-Houghton was born in Wythenshawe, Manchester in 1982. Her first collection, A Body Made of You, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2011, and Beautiful Girls was published in 2013 and was a PBS Recommendation. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in literary magazines such as Poetry Salzburg, The New Writer, Magma and Tears in the Fence. Her poem, ‘Jim’, was included in Starry Rhymes, a chapbook published by Read This Press. She is a regular reviewer for The Short Review.
Hannah Lowe
Hannah Lowe was born in Essex in 1976 to an English mother and Chinese-Jamaican father. Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) is her debut collection and was shortlisted for the Forward and Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prizes and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry. She has followed this with two pamphlets, R x in 2013 and Ormonde in 2014. She is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing and her family memoir Long Time, No See will be published by Garnet Press in January 2015.
Kei Miller
Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He read English at the University of the West Indies and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His poetry collections include Kingdom of Empty Bellies, (Heaventree Press, 2006) and There Is an Anger That Moves (Carcanet, 2007). He is also the editor of Carcanet's New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology. He has been a visiting writer at York University in Canada and currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
Helen Mort
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985. She has published two pamphlets with tall lighthouse press, the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost, a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2010. Five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, she
received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Division Street, Helen’s first collection, published by Chatto & Windus in 2013, was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.
Daljit Nagra
Daljit Nagra was born and raised in West London, then Sheffield, and currently lives in London where he works as a teacher. His first collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, won the 2007 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. In 2008 he won the South Bank Show/Arts Council Decibel Award. His second collection, Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2011.
Heather Phillipson
Heather Phillipson received an Eric Gregory Award in 2008, a Donut Press mentoring award and a Faber New Poets Award in 2009. Her first collection, Instant-Flex 718, was published by Bloodaxe in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Her text Not An Essay was published by Penned in the Margins in 2012. As an artist, Phillipson exhibits nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery, the ICA and the BALTIC in the UK, and Bunker 259 in New York, as well as being featured on Channel 4’s Random Acts.
Kae Tempest
Kae Tempest is a poet, lyricist, performer and recording artist. He has published plays, poems, a novel, a book-length essay, released albums and toured extensively, selling out shows from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. He received Mercury Music Prize nominations for both of the albums Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos, and two Ivor Novello nominations for his song-writing on The Book of Traps and Lessons. He received the Ted Hughes Award for his long-form narrative poem Brand New Ancients and the Leone D’Argento at the Venice Teatro Biennale for his work as a playwright.
Mark Waldron
Mark Waldron was born in New York and grew up in London, and began writing poetry in his early 40s. His first book, The Brand New Dark was published by Salt Publishing in 2008 and his second, The Itchy Sea, came out in September 2011, which were followed by three from Bloodaxe, Meanwhile, Trees (2016), Sweet, like Rinky-Dink (2019) and A Straight Up Giant (2023). His work appears in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and Best British Poetry 2012 and 2013 (Salt). He lives in London with his wife and son.
Sam Willetts
Sam Willetts read English at Wadham College, and worked as a teacher, journalist and travel writer but became addicted to heroin at the age of 37. His debut collection, New Light for the Old Dark (2010), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the Costa Prize and the T S Eliot Prize, and contains poems about the years he spent homeless and addicted to heroin. Now free of drugs, his work covers everything from his mother's plight in the Holocaust to his childhood in Oxfordshire.
Jane Yeh
Jane Yeh was born in America and educated at Harvard University. Her chapbook, Teen Spies, was published in 2003 by Metre Editions. Her first full-length collection, Marabou, was published by Carcanet in 2005 and shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward, and Aldeburgh Festival poetry prizes. She has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She lives in London and lectures in Creative Writing at Kingston University.
THE 2014 GENERATION TOUR
Between October 2014 and March 2015, the 20 winning poets appeared at 23 events in festivals, libraries, arts venues, and bookshops across the country. The promotion culminated in a major celebration at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in March 2015. Next Generation Poets 2014 also had an international dimension. The Poetry Book Society collaborated with the British Council on an international showcase of contemporary British poetry featuring the 20 poets, with readings, conversations and workshops taking place in countries including Bangladesh, India and Brazil from 2015 onwards.
NGP 2014 was supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts and the T S Eliot Estate, which funded the programme as part of a year of support for poetry marking the 50th anniversary of T S Eliot’s death in January 2015.
2014 JUDGES
Ian McMillan
(Chair) Poet
Ian McMillan has worked in schools, theatres, arts centres, fields and front rooms. He’s poet-in-residence for English National Opera, The Academy of Urbanism and Barnsley FC. Previously he was UK Trade & Investment’s Poet, Yorkshire TV’s Investigative Poet and Humberside Police’s Beat Poet. He presents The Verb every week on BBC R3 and he’s a regular on Coast, Pick of the Week, You & Yours, Last Word and The Arts Show. He was recently castaway on Desert Island Discs. Ian currently tours with his acclaimed verse autobiography Talking Myself Home and The Ian McMillan Orchestra, which featured on The South Bank Show and at BBC Proms Plus.
Caroline Bird
Poet
Caroline Bird, who was born in 1986, was a winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year Award in 1999 and 2000, and the Peterloo Poets Competition for Young Poets in 2002, 2003 and 2004. Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published by Carcanet in 2002; her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip, appeared in 2006. Watering Can (2009) was a PBS Recommendation, and her most recent collection The Hat-Stand Union was published in 2013. She was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer prize in 2001 and won a major Eric Gregory Award in 2002.
Clare Pollard
Poet
Clare Pollard was born in 1978, and studied at Cambridge University. Her first poetry collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, was published in 2000 and her second collection, Bedtime, was published in 2002. Her collections of poetry include Look, Clare! Look! (2005), Changeling (2011) and a translation of Ovid’s Heroines (2013). In 2009 she edited an anthology of new poetry with James Byrne: Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (2009). Clare Pollard lives in London and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Essex University.
Paul Farley
Poet
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965. His first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. He was first shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2002 for The Ice Age, which also won the
Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003. He has written widely for BBC Radio and his
book of non-fiction, Edgelands: Journeys
into England’s Last Wilderness (2010), written with Michael Symmons Roberts, won the Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction. His fifth collection, The Dark Film, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2012, and his Selected Poems was published in 2014 by Picador. A 2004 Next Generation Poets finalist.
Robert Crawford
Poet
Robert Crawford is a poet and critic, born in Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1959. He has been the author of six collections of poetry since his first in 1990, four of which have been Poetry Book Society
Recommendations. As a scholar he works as the Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews and as published several volumes of literary criticism on Scottish literature and poetry. He has twice won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and his last collection, Full Volume, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2008. His latest collection is Testament (Jonathan Cape). A 1994 New Generation Poets finalist.
THE NGP LEGACY
Looking back from 2026, Next Generation Poets 2014 forms an important part of the Poetry Book Society’s continuing tradition of identifying and celebrating emerging poets. As with the 1994 and 2004 generations before them, many of the poets selected in 2014 have gone on to make a significant contribution to contemporary poetry, demonstrating the lasting impact of the Next Generation Poets programme.
Head to the Poetry Book Society YouTube channel to view more readings and interviews from the 2014 archive.