A poem about the Lockerbie bomb by a former national newspaper journalist has won a £2,000 prize. ‘Lockerbie, Pan Am Flight 103’, written by Aileen Ballantyne, a former Guardian and Sunday Times journalist, won the annual Mslexia prize. It includes details that were thought to be too harrowing to be published at the time.

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am 103 exploded in the sky above Lockerbie after a bomb concealed in a suitcase went off, killing 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. The first section, ‘Rescue Worker’, includes these lines:

 

     He hoped

     they had slept

     but knew they had not:

     those two young women

     he found in the dark field

     that December night

 

     still strapped

     to their plane-seats,

     their arms

     tight around each other.

     Their fingers crossed.

 

Competition judge Deryn Rees-Jones said: “The winning poem …  is very simply written, yet it is doing something quietly and resolutely. The pace is very accomplished and the three vignettes – each focusing on small details – have a cumulative impact.” She also praised the poet's “complete lack of sentimentality or melodrama - and I don't underestimate how difficult that is to achieve”.

Aileen told Mslexia: “Lockerbie remains the worst terrorist attack in Britain – it was something that resonated, and still resonates, with people in Scotland. I’m hugely grateful to Mslexia for publishing my attempt to say ‘what it was like’.

“My husband’s family comes from the Borders so I know the area a little. This poem sequence came from the words of people who lived in the town the night it happened, or from the words of the many bereaved relatives who travelled there. Listening to and reading those accounts I realised that the reaction of people in Lockerbie to global terrorism arriving on their doorstep was remarkably straightforward: when a stranger from 3,000 miles away knocks on your door asking you where her dead son landed you invite her in for a cup of tea, then you take her there. The response was entirely practical. But it was also extraordinary.”

In an accompanying piece alongside the poem in Mslexia she says: “I’d been a newspaper journalist for many years but, like many journalists, I always wanted to write a novel or a play. So I signed up for a creative writing course at my local Office of Lifelong Learning – and got hooked on poetry instead. That was seven years ago. Before that I had never written any poetry at all. From there I went on to study for a postgrad MSc in creative writing, then a PhD. I think, in some ways, that poetry’s a bit like journalism, with its intense focus on an immediate finite project, and that sense of completion. The difference is that poetry can do things journalism never can.

“I’ve wanted to write about Lockerbie, as a poet, for many years but in a way that wasn’t intrusive. I was working at the Guardian in London as their medical correspondent when it happened and I managed to get a call through to one of the rescue workers on his mobile. The material was so disturbing we couldn’t print it, but it stayed with me.

“Everything in the poem is based on things that actually happened. I changed some of the names, however, and simplified some events. I did a lot of research – documentaries, articles, books, interviews. The middle section, “On a Hillside”, which gives an overview, was the hardest to write. On the advice of my PhD tutor, poet Alan Gillis, I looked at David Harsent’s war poetry. I wanted to find a way of turning reportage into poetry –  using a very plain language, but with a rhythm that was right for its subject, and with line breaks that added the right weight to each word. A lot of the work of the poem was paring it back to the right detail.”

Aileen now teaches contemporary poetry and English and Scottish literature at the University of Edinburgh, and is editing and putting the final touches to a first collection. She has in the past been commended twice in the British Press Awards. She will be reading her prizewinning Mslexia poem at Newcastle arts centre’s Black Swan bar on 23 September. She will also be reading another prizewinning poem at the Poetry on the Lake festival in Italy next month.