The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets 2011

The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets
The British Library, with the generous support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, is pleased to present the third year of The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets.

Judges Lavinia Greenlaw, Robert Hampson and Richard Price  have now chosen the shortlist for Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets.

The Michael Marks Poetry Award recognises a single outstanding work of poetry published in pamphlet form in the UK during 2010.

The seven short-listed pamphlets chosen from over 100 entries are:

• Neil Addison, Apocapulco (Salt): Tesco, Proms Night, Jeremy Clarkson and the debt crisis – all this and much more feature in this packed collection.

• Simon Armitage, The Motorway Service Station as a Destination in its Own Right(Smith/Doorstop Books): Quietly ironised monologues, flashes of startlingly apt imagery, and a dry but never arid sense of humour.

• Sean Burn, mo thunder (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press): A collection of visual poetry in which found words and phrases have been placed under pressure and re-configured.

• Olive Broderick, Darkhaired (Templar): a book of open landscape, where the need for epic journeys is mourned and where meetings, even when planned, seem fleeting, insecure, fragile.

• Ralph Hawkins, Happy Whale Fat Smile (Oystercatcher): Disorientatingly funny: a journey across the whitespace of the Arctic and the page. A wry and unexpectedly touching book.

• James McGonigal, Cloud Pibroch (Mariscat): This is a book which is as lyrical as it is unsettling. Striking metaphors rooted in acute observation animate and resonate.

• Sophie Robinson, The Lotion (Oystercatcher): Desire and loss are inscribed in a work whose poems are on the move – at the tingling pace of the pulse.

The Michael Marks Publishers' Award recognises an outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form.

The five short-listed publishers are:

• The Crater Press
• Kater Murr’s Press
• The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press
• Mariscat Press
• Roncadora Press

For enquiries about this year’s Awards please contact Tanya Kirk, the British Library’s Lead Curator of Printed Literary Sources at tanya.kirk@bl.uk.

The winners of both awards will be announced and presented with a cheque for £5,000 at a reading and awards ceremony at the British Library on 13 June 2011.