Jamaican poet Kei Miller has won the top Forward prize for the best poetry collection of 2014 with The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way To Zion.  Liz Berry won the Felix Dennis prize for best first collection for Black Country, the place of her birth, and written in the region’s dialect. Stephen Santus won the best single poem for ‘In a Restaurant.’ Miller, 35, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and financed his studies at Manchester Metropolitan University by winning poetry slams, currently teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway college, University of London. His collection features a mapmaker who speaks the Queen’s English but sucks his teeth like a Jamaican, and a “Rasta-man” with a PhD.

The chair of the judges, Jeremy Paxman, said: “Kei is doing something you don’t come across often: this is a beautifully voiced collection which struck us all with its boldness and wit. Many poets refer to multiple realities, different ways of observing the world. Kei doesn’t just refer, he articulates them."

Paxman also said that he and his fellow judges had been looking for poetry that could reach the widest possible audience, and their decisions had been made quickly. He still included a few barbs, observing that there was a need “to spread the gospel of poetry in a land which has almost forgotten it,” and that "printed contemporary poetry is simply irrelevant to most people’s lives".

Miller said he was delighted to find that Rastaman poetry could win not just a slam but something as prestigious as the Forward prize. In an interview in the Guardian published on Monday, Miller said that at the heart of his work is a quest for a way of being and seeing that resists orthodoxies: “Why is the iambic pentameter seen as more credible than the Rasta nayabinghi [drumming] beat? Both claim to represent a heartbeat rhythm, but they’re drastically different.”

Kei Miller was first a young preacher in Jamaica, but abandoned the church for an academic career in Britain. As a student in Manchester, he earned money by winning poetry slams, becoming the 2004 Manchester slam poetry champion. He later said: “I am ashamed to have won that prize, and truth be told I am also ashamed that I am ashamed”.

In the eight years since his first collection was published he has produced two novels, a short story collections, three more poetry collections and a book of “essays and prophecies”, and he is also a prolific blogger and tweeter. He attributes his productivity partly to his recently diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kei Miller is due to read at the Southbank Centre on Thursday in National Poetry Day Live. 

The singer Cerys Matthews was one of the judges alongside poets Vahni Capildeo, Helen Mort and Dannie Abse, who died on Sunday, before the final judging. Matthews led the evening with a tribute to Abse, reading two poems from his last collection, Speak, Old Parrot. Abse's voice remains in his poems: "In the mildew of age / all pavements slope uphill" ('Talking to Myself'), words quoted by Owen Sheers in a tweet.

LIz Berry read beautifully from her Black Country, which won best first collection, a poem about the loss of dialect (although demonstrating no loss of dialect herself) and local language, inextricably tied up as these things are with memories of home and childhood. Reviewing it in the Observer, Kate Kellaway said: "Black Country is an extraordinary debut and rooted in place. When you close the book, you can still see the Black Country in your mind's eye, as if all the poems in it were coming together to form a continuous landscape, a single yet varied view." 

There was a reading of a selection of other work submitted for the prizes (apparently 160 collections and about 250 individual poems) from a variety of poets, introduced by and with readings from actors Samuel West and Juliet Stevenson, before the shortlisted poets took the stage for the Best Collection prize.

Stephen Santus' poem, 'In a Restaurant', which won best single poem, also came third in the 2013 Bridport prize.

Background: 'It's much bigger than the personal'