David Clarke’s pamphlet Gaud has won the £5,000 2013 Michael Marks award, with its publisher, Flarestack,  also winning the publisher’s award.  The awards were presented at the British Library on Tuesday night. The judges said of Clarke: "David Clarke's Gaud drew us in with dark and unsettling narratives, which carry us from the front room of an amateur sword swallower to the frontline of some foreign land, as the tanks roll in and Death slides under the sheets. Clarke's poems are acutely observed studies of what happens to the subject - and the subject's body-- when private and political pressures join forces to seduce and to menace.”

The awards are presented by the Wordsworth Trust and the British Library, backed by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in association with the Times Literary Supplement.

PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN /  WRITE OUT LOUD