Graduate’s ‘heart-stopping’ poems on love and loss shortlisted for LGBTQ+ prize
A book of poems by a Manchester Met graduate documenting a gay relationship, and the grief and sense of loss when a partner dies unexpectedly, has been shortlisted for a prestigious LGBTQ+ writing prize.
Paul Stephenson wrote his debut poetry collection Hard Drive (Carcanet) about his own experience of bereavement following the sudden death of his partner in 2016, and it has been shortlisted for the 2024 Polari Prizes, the UK’s book prizes for emerging and established LGBTQ+ writers.
Endorsed as a ‘heart-stopping debut of real emotional force and poetic intelligence’ by poet Seán Hewitt, some of the early poems from the book were written while Stephenson was on the MA Creative Writing course (online) at Manchester Met’s Manchester Writing School.
The collection records his immediate grief and the practicalities of death, the routines and rituals of bereavement, and the professional people he met on the way, before going on to revisit the early days of Stephenson’s relationship with his partner, also an academic and writer.
As such, the poems speak to anybody who has lost someone and has been referred to as a ‘poetic handbook on grief’.
Described as ‘a hopeful record of a gay relationship’, Hard Drive will go up against other highly acclaimed LGBTQ+ fiction at a ceremony at the British Library on Friday 29 November.
Stephenson said: “I’m touched that my book stood out to the Polari judges. I started writing the poems in Hard Drive while studying for my MA under the supervision of my tutor Jean Sprackland, and during writing workshops with Helen Mort and Michael Symmons Roberts.”
“I met some wonderful people on the course, and it gave me a lot of confidence to explore my writing and creativity at a time in my life that was extremely difficult. It’s been wonderful to get this recognition.”
Hard Drive was also shortlisted for the Gay Poetry Lammy Award 2024 in the US earlier this year, and follows several recent accolades for Manchester Writing School students and graduates including Charlotte Shevchenko Knight’s shortlist for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and her and Ian Humphrey’s nomination for the Laurel Prize 2024.
The Polari Book Prizes are run by Polari Literary Salon, and were founded by author and activist, Paul Burston. In 2019, its inaugural year, it was won by Andrew McMillan, Manchester Writing School’s Professor of Contemporary Writing, for his poetry collection Playtime (Cape Poetry).
