Award-winning poet Jonathan Edwards has won the £2,000 Troubadour prize with his poem ‘My Grandfather’s Car’. One of the two judges, Victoria Kennefick, said: “It is a glorious poem in both theme and language, recalling all the old jalopies we all encounter – how they become one with the driver over time – the grandfather’s wing mirrors, ‘wept/his sadness out in big brown tears’. A vessel that holds the vessel of another become enmeshed with each other, and the speaker uses the vessel of the poem also, to hold what cannot be said. It is a very special piece of writing indeed.”

Her fellow judge, Joshua Bennett, said described it as “one of the more moving poems I have read in some time. It transported me back to the concerns and questions that first brought me to the page as a young writer, looking to transform the music and imagery of my surroundings into a language worthy of sharing with friends, family, and strangers alike.”

Second was Anna Crowe with ‘Folds’, and third was Robert Maslen with ‘A Change of Scene’.

You can read the judge’s comments in full, and the prize-winning poems and commended poems here