The winners of two big poetry competitions have been revealed this week. At the weekend it was announced that Mark Pajak, pictured, had won this year’s £5,000 Bridport poetry prize for his poem ‘Spitting Distance’. Judge Patience Agbabi said of his poem: “It has a directness, an understated authority of voice: So this is what it’s like to be a gun. There’s tension in its couplets, it knows when to use enjambment and when not. It rhymes irregularly so you barely notice yet this punctuates the voice, enhances the pleasure … Finally, the poem takes a bold risk at the end and manages to carry it off. This is poetry at its best.”

Mark Pajak has previously been commended in the National Poetry Competition. Second was Laura Watson, and third Caroline Price.

The winner of the £1,000 Ledbury poetry festival competition was Miller Oberman, from Brooklyn, US, for his poem ‘On Fishing’. Miller Oberman’s first book, a collection of poems and translations, The Unstill Ones, is due out from Princeton University Press next year. He is a teaching fellow at the University of Connecticut, and lives in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with his wife, rock singer Louisa Solomon of The Shondes. Richard Evans won second prize with ‘Icari’, and third was Paul Nash (‘August Blossom’). More details