Sinéad Morrissey has won the 2017 Forward prize worth £10,000 with her collection On Balance. The chair of the Forward judges, TV presenter and journalist Andrew Marr, described her poems as “beautifully written, emotionally charged and filled with a wonderful complexity”.

Morrissey, who was born in 1972 in Portadown, was Belfast’s inaugural poet laureate, and is now professor of poetry at Newcastle University. Her collection Parallax won the 2013 TS Eliot prize.

At the Forwards prizegiving at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday night she read two poems from her collection – one about the launching of the Titanic, and another about a relative cleaning up at a cinema after a Beatles concert in Nottingham in 1963. She has said her collection is about “physical balance, structural balance, gender balance, ecological balance, life-death balance”.

The £5,000 Felix Dennis prize for best first collection went to Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese refugee who went to the US at the age of two, and was the first member of his immediate family to read or write. Mona Arshi, a member of the Forward judging panel, said the “courageous” collection explored historical trauma alongside personal experience.

Ian Patterson won the £1,000 best single poem prize for ‘The Plenty of Nothing’, in memory of his wife, the writer Jenny Diski, who died of cancer last year. Marr said the judges had deliberated over whether the poem “was too difficult to win. Then in the end the consensus was that it is just such a good poem that, difficult or not, we wanted to put it in front of people.” Mona Arshi said the poem "reinvigorated the elegy form" and was "saturated with grief". It was published in PN Review magazine. 

Although two of the three winners on Thursday night came from the UK, other shortlisted poets were from Hong Kong, the US, Jamaica, Trinidad, Uganda, and Ireland. Andrew Marr said that although the Forward was nominally a national prize, "Britain has aspirations to be the world's island, and London the world's capital". 

William Sieghart, founder of the Forward prizes, opened the evening by reading a short poem by Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who died earlier this year, describing him as a "wonderful and generous artist". Later in the evening he also mentioned the late UK-based American literary agent Ed Victor, who he said had helped him launch the Forwards 26 years ago.

Fourteen of the 15 poets shortlisted for the three prizes turned up to the prizegiving. The only one not there, Andrew Georges, lives in the British Virgin Islands, and was stranded by the hurricanes. He was able to send an audio reading of his poem, and a message which talked of drainage problems and fears of landslides, and added: “Thanks for all your prayers and concern. We are still here.”

 

PHOTOGRAPH: ADRIAN POPE 

 

Background: The Forward shortlists