The Melita Hume Poetry Prize Winner!
Posted on July 24, 2012 in Uncategorized
Supporting young emerging writers during difficult economic times, the International Melita Hume Poetry Prize offers £1000 and publication with Eyewear Publishing Ltd. for the best debut poetry collection.
Caleb Klaces, a talented young writer from Birmingham, is our winner for his poignant poetry collection titled Bottled Air. This isn’t the first time Caleb has been in the spotlight – he has also won a coveted Eric Gregory Award 2012 and been named a Granta ‘New Poet’ this year.
Judge Tim Dooley, poet and reviews editor, Poetry London, impressed by our varied shortlist, cherry-picked the winner, a runner up and two highly commended individuals. Please see below for his comments:
Winner – £1,000 and publication by Eyewear in 2013.
Bottled Air Caleb Klaces (UK)
This is a powerful and original collection, which reveals its riches and depths gradually and rewards repeated reading. Klaces is well-read and does not wear his learning lightly, yet the poetry is not wilfully clever or self-satisfied but fully accessible – its engaging footnotes integrated into the wit and imagination of the whole work. Bottled Air works as a book not just a collection of poems. It evokes the tragic European past and the global instantaneous present. At its heart is a wounded compassion and an openness to the variousness of experience. What he writes in a poem from the central section (set in a Bulgarian orphanage) is true of much else in the book:
…this is what being human is really, something plain and unbearably alive.
Klaces sets his own agenda as a writer but creates a trust in the reader, which is unusually well rewarded.
Runner Up – £100.
Frogs and Gods by Colette Sensier (UK)
Highly Commended – £50.
Beds in the East by Jason Eng Hun Lee (Hong Kong/China)
Somniloquy by Bethan Tichbourne (UK)
About Eyewear:
Eyewear Publishing Ltd. is based in London, England. It was founded in the Diamond Jubilee/Olympic year of 2012. Emphasis is on excellent new work, as well as the rediscovery of out-of-print figures.
Contact: info@eyewearpublishing.com
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