Book Launch: The New Poets’ Prize 2023

Join us as we celebrate the launch of the Poetry Business New Poets’ Prize pamphlets 2023. This years’ winners are Serena Alagappan, Tom Branfoot, Chloe Elliott and Beth Davies, chosen by judge Anthony Anaxagorou.

The New Poets Prize is a pamphlet competition for writers between the ages of 17 and 24 established in 2016 by The Poetry Business. Previous winners include Phoebe Stuckes, Sarah Fletcher, Jay Gao and Gboyega Odubanjo.

Serena Alagappan’s Sensitive to Temperature seeks out the precariousness and sensitivities of language, as well as the fragilities of the world it represents. These are eco-poems that experience time on a human and non-human scale, from the movements of rock to the sources of rivers.

Chloe Elliot’s Encyclopaedia is playful and visceral, exploring boundaries of identity and the search for meaning in poems that delight with richly tactile language. Formally varied, these poems are unflinching in their physicality.

Tom Branfoot’s This is Not an Epiphany examines inner and outer landscapes that have become inhospitable; where people are ‘burnt / by business as usual’. This collection is attentive to shifting landscapes where warehouses spring up on empty land, and the incremental austerities that constitute our living; its lyric absorbs the shocks and crises of survival within them.

Beth Davies’ The Pretence of Understanding explores loss, not just of loved ones but of youth and adolescence. In these poems where time can stand still or run backwards, the reader finds themselves caught in longing moments of looking back at childhood; they remind us to run in the snow while we get the chance.