Lecturer’s ‘phenomenal and powerful’ poetry collection wins prestigious Forward Prize
Poet and lecturer Dr Kim Moore has won the Forward Prize for Poetry’s Best Collection award with her ‘phenomenal and powerful’ second collection All The Men I Never Married.
The Forward Prizes for Poetry honours excellence in contemporary poetry published in the UK and Ireland across three categories with the £10,000 prize for Best Collection.
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.
Moore’s new collection All The Men I Never Married is “pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire”. It contains 48 numbered poems which take the reader “through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.”
The collection was described by judge Stephen Sexton as a “tonally profound collection which is precise, careful, unfolding, whose methodical, numbered poems show us the work and process of overcoming people and encounters”, while fellow judge Nadine Aisha Jassat described it as “a phenomenal and powerful collection”.
Moore, Lecturer in Creative Writing, and a recent alumna of the University’s MA and PhD in Creative Writing, said: “I still can’t quite believe that I’ve won and have to keep telling myself, yes, it really happened! It was also exciting to receive the prize in Manchester. That really felt like coming full circle, as All the Men I Never Married was written as part of my PhD research at Manchester Metropolitan University. It was also an honour to stand alongside the other shortlisted poets, whose work I have admired and read for many, many years.”
I still can’t quite believe that I’ve won and have to keep telling myself, yes, it really happened! It was also exciting to receive the prize in Manchester. That really felt like coming full circle, as All the Men I Never Married was written as part of my PhD research at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Professor Jess Edwards, Head of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “Like Zaffar Kunial, who recently won Yale University’s Windham Campbell prize, Kim Moore was already an established poet with a growing reputation before joining Manchester Metropolitan for her PhD research. We’re very proud to be able to attract creative researchers of this calibre and to have been able to support Kim’s career. And we’re very lucky that she’s now joined as a colleague, currently sharing her passion for poetry and her expertise as a teacher with students from foundation year to postgraduate level.”
The Forward Prizes for Poetry winners were announced earlier this week (November 28) during an awards ceremony at Manchester’s Contact Theatre.
The judging panel included celebrated novelist and activist Fatima Bhutto, Chair of Judges, and poets Rishi Dastidar, Alice Hiller, Nadine Aisha Jassat and Stephen Sexton.
Alongside Moore, Dr Helen Mort, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University was nominated in the same category with her third collection The Illustrated Woman.
Moore also joins 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.
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 is accompanied by The Forward Book of Poetry, an annual anthology which brings together the best new work published in the UK and Ireland.
