Jenny Mitchell''s 'Map of a Plantation' wins international prize
Jenny Mitchell’s collection Map of a Plantation, about slavery on a Jamaican cane plantation, has won the Welsh poetry competition’s International Poetry Book award. Second was Alchemy by Fiona Perry, and third was Bone House, by Kathy Miles.
The prize is for indie writers, self-published authors or books published by small, truly independent presses. Judge Mike Jenkins said of the winning collection: “What I love so much about this are the many distinctive voices she adopts, to bring alive the sheer degree of torment and terror endured by both slaves and servants in the Jamaican plantations. Here too, however, there’s ultimately a sense of hope, with a final more autobiographical section.”
In an interview with Write Out Loud earlier this year, Jenny Mitchell said of her collection: “It’s really important to me that the legacies of enslavement be widely known because this may be the only way they can be healed. It’s an emotive subject, almost unbearably so, but I think this might be the time when people want to face the history.”
PHOTOGRAPH: BILLY GRANT
