Student Poetry Prize 2024: Winning Entries

This year current undergraduate and postgraduate Newcastle University students were invited to submit a poem that explores the idea of place in the broadest sense. Thank you to everyone who entered.

Entries were judged by Neil Astley, Editor & Managing Director of Bloodaxe Books Ltd, and our Chancellor and award-winning poet, Imtiaz Dharker.

The winners will receive a prize of £250 and the opportunity to read their poem at the Honorary Fellowships Celebration and the Newcastle Poetry Festival.

Nadine El-Enany, MA Writing Poetry, Poetry School London

Winner for the poem 'Sidmouth Seagull'

Nadine El-Enany’s poetry has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Propel Magazine, 14 Magazine, fourteen poems, Gutter Magazine, Black Iris and Poetry Wales. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize and longlisted for the 2023 Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition and the 2022 Fish Poetry Prize. She is the author of (B)ordering Britain: Law, race and empire.

Sidmouth Seagull by Nadine El-Enany

Lying in the sand, too heavy for being
swept out to where miracles
coagulate to make ocean,
the gull lays its head
Christ-like on my shoulder
having only moments ago
taken the fish from my hand.
I don’t say stolen
because seagulls know the meaning
of hunt and scavenge
if language is upholstery
and underneath it what matters.
Concepts of morality and crime
are how we pretend humanity.
If the fish belongs anywhere
it’s to itself and then to the sea
where the gull will find it.
If we belong anywhere
it’s in childhood where language
is love for how the body makes song.

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, MA Writing Poetry, Poetry School London

Winner for the poem 'Blackbird'

Suzanna Fitzpatrick (she/her) is a bisexual poet with poems on Radio 4 and widely published in magazines and anthologies. She came third in the 2023 Shepton Snowdrops Competition, second in the 2016 Café Writers Competition, and won the 2014 Hamish Canham Prize. Pamphlets: Fledglings (2016), Crippled (2025) (Red Squirrel Press).

Blackbird by Suzanna Fitzpatrick

When the sky has been grey for a month,
vegetation stewed limp by thaw
in the suburban gardens you pass daily,
and always, it seems, uphill –

there is sometimes reason to pause,
as now – a sound, briefly unplaceable
until you look up to a blackbird, singing
despite winter, despite the absence of love,

despite no biological imperative
other than song itself: his fluting
diminished to a muted croon
flickering in his throat

as a flame burns low, so low
you think it ash, until it stirs.

Here by Finlay Worrallo

You are here. But where is that
to you? Right between your ears

you flitter like a trapped fly against
the glass of your eyes. Is the back

of your chair digging in? Stand up.
Step out of this brief box

of a room that holds you.
The city runs rings around you

in concentric circles, with you
their common centre. Stand

your ground! Plant your soles
on the back of this current

island, once a peninsula, split
from the continent by the sudden

drowning of Doggerland. Can you see
the seas bubbling round the horizon

or is that beyond you? How wide
are your eyes? No telescopes,

they may not see the glint
of our world’s mote, floating

in a distant sunbeam. Here is
in other words a summit,

a pinprick of rock above the clouds,
for looking down on everything over there,

the othered side, split from us,
the sundered lands beyond

the river, rent from this
our own patch, our place.

A place solid as water. Are you certain you know
where you are? And will you be there tomorrow?

High Street Disappearance by Steve Kendall

He tries to tell the woman in the newsagents
that he is looking for – how to explain?
She has a go at guessing – keys, God, phone, love, wallet.
No. She asks him where he saw it last.

He can’t say. Perhaps, she suggests, it was
an exotic fruit, like a pomegranate or pomelo?
If so, he can be certain it is altogether gone.
He should find a quiet place to sit and grieve.

When he has left, she unfolds a rainbow-
striped camping chair and sets it down
in the middle of the shop, beside the periodicals.
She fetches herself a dish, pours out

a little bag of kumquats, eats them one by one
leafing through a piece in Woman’s Weekly
with recipes for papaya, carambola, sapodilla.

Outside, he stops the passers-by, shows them
photos on a laminated card. They shake their heads.

1

Once upon a time, there was a town infested with rats. The pied piper told the townspeople he could get rid of the rats, and so he played his flute and the rats followed him into the river, drowning in the currents, but the townspeople refused to pay the pied piper for his service. He returned to play his flute again. This time, the children followed him. They were lost.

2

Once upon a time, there was a town infested with rats. The pied piper told the townspeople he could get rid of the rats, and so he played his flute and the rats followed him into the river. With their little paws linked, they floated. The song said follow, it didn’t say let go.

3

Once upon a time, there was a town infested with people. The pied piper told the rats he could get rid of the people and the rats said they’re not so bad.

4

Once upon a time, the pied piper bought a flute with a song like honey. His mother used to place a jar of honey on the windowsill. He would dip his finger in and she would smack it away. For the wasps, not for you.

5

There are several meanings to the word lost. Are the children still wandering, music-sodden, over storybook hills? Are they holding hands?

6

I hate euphemisms for death.

7

Once upon a time, there was a man in a green coat with a sleeping bag around his knees, sitting on the street corner. He played the flute and nobody heard him. The rats did. They said keep playing, keep playing, we will follow you anywhere, and in the shadows beneath bins and the cracks between buildings and the warmth within pizza boxes, they danced.

8

The pied piper was a child once too. He was a wasp, wings glued with honey. The river would whisper at him to follow it down, down, down and then there would be clear blue darkness and
he would be filled with water-song and the river would carry him away, away, away and in his lungs it would be syrupy and sweet.

9

Once upon a time, the townspeople and the rats sat down in a room and the rats said why do you want us gone and the townspeople said we hate your kind and the rats said we want to dance like the river and live like the subway trains and the townspeople said somewhere else somewhere else somewhere else but there was nowhere else to go.

10

Rats and children, children and rats, two by two. They will hold hands.