A collage of verbatim survivor testimonies from the Hillsborough disaster, which has been published to mark its 30th anniversary, and is described as an epic-poem that is “part oral history and part documentary theatre”, is on the £5,000 Forward prize shortlist for best first collection, it has been announced. Truth Street is by Suffolk-based David Cain, who leads projects using literature and art to explore history. 

Also on the shortlist is Raymond Antrobus’s The Perseverance, which has already this year won the Ted Hughes award and the Folio prize. Other contenders include Jay Bernard’s Surge, which combines documentary and song to describe the 13 young black lives lost in the 1981 New Cross fire. An earlier version won last year’s Ted Hughes award.  Also on the shortlist are Isabel Galleymore’s Significant Other, a sustained look at the “eight million differently constructed hearts” of species currently said to inhabit Earth; and Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young, an account of the Super Mario World video games that shaped his experience of his mother’s death.

The £10,000 best collection shortlist is made up of Fiona Benson’s repurposing of Greek mythology in Vertigo & Ghost, in which Zeus is a serial rapist; Niall Campbell’s Noctuary, a diary that voices the late nights and early mornings of fatherhood; Ukraine-born Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, a love story punctuated by sign language and set in a fictional military occupation where resistance takes thde form of deafness; Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here, love sonnets tracing immigrant anxiety and the intimacies of marriage; and Helen Tookey’s City of Departures, a mix of prose and verse that creates an urban patchwork of glimpsed moments and chance affiliations.

The 2019 judging panel is chaired by Shahidha Bari, presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking. She is joined by Jamie Andrews, head of the British Library’s cultural and learning programme and poets Tara Bergin, Andrew McMillan, Carol Rumens. The panel read 204 collections and 183 single poems.

Bari said: “What stood out was a playfulness and willingness to experiment with genre. Some of the work we’ve selected will look like poetry, sound like poetry, but it could also fall into the categories of other forms: there are lots of prose poems too. And we were surprised at how blurred the boundary between poetry and drama has become. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising as we have such a rich tradition of performance poetry in this country, but this is a different development. It’s been so thrilling in the last few years watching the boom in poetry, the great affection for poetry, the passion for poetry. That’s given people who both read and teach poetry a great deal of comfort, inspiration and hope.”

McMillan said: “Certain poets in the past may have thought that politics was beneath art but a lot of these collections, especially from newer poets, are really getting down in the mud and wrestling with the intricacies and difficulties of our new political situation. Poetry remains high art but has come down from its high shelf: its boundaries have expanded."

The shortlist for the £1,000 best singe poem prize is: Liz Berry, ‘Highbury Park’; Mary Jean Chan, ‘The Window’; Jonathan Edwards ‘Bridge’; Parwana Fayyaz ‘Forty Names’; Holly Pester ‘Comic Timing’.

The awards will be presented at a special event at Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday 20 October, featuring readings from all the shortlisted books, and closing Southbank Centre's Poetry International festival which this year runs 17-20 October as part of London literature festival. The judges’ selection of shortlisted and highly commended poems will be published on 5 September 2019 as the annual Forward Book of Poetry 2020 (Faber).