Jay Bernard has won this year's £5,000 Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry for Surge: Side A, which was performed last year at the Roundhouse as part of the Last Word festival, investigating the New Cross fire of 1981 that claimed 13 lives. Bernard wrote in the voices of those killed, and used archive film, video and audio.

The judges said when Bernard, who uses the pronoun “they”, was shortlisted: “Startling and fresh and unique… a moving and powerful struggle for validation in the Black British community, and the poet’s own clarification of identity. The performances are riveting and the poems are propelled by a strong internal momentum.”

This year's judges were Gillian Allnutt, Sally Beamish, and Lemn Sissay. The Guardian reported Beamish as saying that what most impressed the panel about Bernard’s performance was “the honesty, the vulnerability and the fact it was so intensely personal”.

“What Jay has done is to relate the story of the New Cross fire from their own perspective,” Beamish said. “In an amazing way, they’ve made a parallel between that struggle for validation in the black British community and their own redefining of their gender through surgery. It made it a very intimate experience, very personal and very brave.”

The performance centres on a young woman who died in the fire, Beamish said, “a girl who expected to become a woman and never did. Perhaps there’s also a parallel there with Jay, who was born a girl and was expected to become a woman, but has made a different choice.”

The £5,000 Ted Hughes prize is donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from the annual honorarium the poet laureate traditionally receives from the Queen.

Background: The award shortlist