Helen Mort and Kim Moore shortlisted for top UK poetry prize
Two University poets are shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry, one of the most important awards of its kind in the UK.
Dr Helen Mort and Dr Kim Moore are both nominated for Best Collection, a £10,000 prize previously given to two poet laureates and a host of other internationally established names.
Mort’s shortlisted work The Illustrated Woman, released next month, is a “tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body”, while Moore’s collection All the Men I Never Married is “pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire”.
If victorious, Mort or Moore would join previous Manchester Metropolitan winners Professor Carol Ann Duffy (1993) and Professor Michael Symmons Roberts (2013) in being awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2020, lecturer Malika Booker was awarded the £1,000 Prize for Best Single Poem, an award Moore was shortlisted for in 2015.
Mort, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Writing School, Manchester Metropolitan, said: “As a former judge of the Forward Prize, it’s a special honour to be shortlisted for one of the awards. I’m excited that the prize giving is coming to Manchester, a recognition of the brilliant poetry scene here.”
Moore, Lecturer in Creative Writing, and a recent alumna of the University’s MA and PhD in Creative Writing, said: “It still feels like an impossible dream to be on this shortlist, alongside these amazing writers, especially Helen, whose work has been so important to me throughout my development as a poet.”
The Illustrated Woman is Mort’s third collection, following Division Street (2013), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and No Map Could Show Them. She has also released a novel, Black Car Burning, and the narrative memoir A Line Above the Sky.
As a former judge of the Forward Prize, it’s a special honour to be shortlisted for one of the awards. I’m excited that the prize giving is coming to Manchester, a recognition of the brilliant poetry scene here.
Set “amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland”, Mort’s poems “transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience”. Her collection has been hailed by Saltwater author Jessica Andrews who says it “bristles with colour and truth”, while fellow University poet Andrew McMillan says Mort’s work “offers us footpaths through the landscape of the body, showing us all the ways we might mark, redeem, protect or fear for both our own and the bodies of others”.
A special event will mark the launch of The Illustrated Woman on July 12 featuring discussions, workshops and performances exploring tattoos as art, hosted by Manchester Writing School and Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan.
All The Men I Never Married is Moore’s second collection, following 2015’s The Art of Falling, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her book of lyric essays What the Trumpet Taught Me was published earlier this year.
It still feels like an impossible dream to be on this shortlist, alongside these amazing writers, especially Helen, whose work has been so important to me throughout my development as a poet.
Her new collection contains 48 numbered poems which take the reader “through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.” It is critically acclaimed, not least by her contemporaries, with Booker describing it as “urgent and necessary and vital”, containing “fraught hymns that testifies, catalogues, and interrogates the policing of women’s bodies in contemporary society”.
The Forward Prizes for Poetry are the most influential awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland. 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the Prizes, and will be accompanied by the Forward Book of Poetry, an annual anthology which brings together the best new work published in the UK and Ireland.
Fatima Bhutto, chair of the judges, said: “To spend the better part of a year thinking about poetry has been an incredible gift. The collections we pored over reminded me of care and the power strangers exert over each other in so many delicate and fragile ways. We have assembled here a collection of debut writers, masters, believers and doubters, all of them innate observers of our intimate lives. Some of them you may already know, others will be a revelation.”
Winners will be announced at a live event on November 28, hosted at Manchester’s Contact Theatre.
