James Berry Poetry Prize

Imtiaz Dharker FRSL is a poet, artist and video film maker. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014 and is Chancellor of Newcastle University. Her seven collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Shadow Reader. Her poems have featured widely on BBC radio, television, the London Underground, Glasgow billboards and Mumbai buses. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and also scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee and is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

Nathalie Teitler Hon FRSL is the Director of the Complete Works Poetry, founded by Bernardine Evaristo OBE, a mentoring and development programme that has had a significant impact on the level of Black, Asian & Latinx poets published by major UK publishers. Born in Argentina, she is also the co-founder of Nuevo Sol – A New Sun – (along with poet Leo Boix), an organisation promoting British Latinx and Latinx/ Latin American writers around the world. In 2017, she also founded a dance poetry organisation: Dancing Words that has made a series of poetry dance films that have been seen at festivals around the world. She is currently working on a tango-based novel, set in Buenos Aires in 1900.

Neil Astley Hon FRSL is the editor of Bloodaxe Books which he founded in 1978. His books include many anthologies, most notably those in the Staying Alive series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020), along with four collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food, Soul Feast, and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, and has published two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, as well as two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World.

Theresa Muñoz is Director of the Newcastle Poetry Festival and Research Associate in Contemporary Poetry at Newcastle University. She has published one collection of poetry, Settle, which shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been published in international journals such as Canadian Literature, Poetry Review and Southword. She has been awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, a Muriel Spark Centenary Award and a Creative Scotland Award and shortlisted for The Kavya Prize, Scotland’s only award for writers of colour.

Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She is the author of two poetry collections, an innovative verse novel Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024) and the editor of seven literary anthologies, including Nature Matters, co-edited with Mona Arshi (Faber, 2025). In 2019 she moved to Los Angeles as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar and Writer in Residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA, exploring the relationship between poetry, law and language. This research forms the basis of her new poetry collection Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Jacob Sam-La Rose is a poet, facilitator, programme leader, artistic director and poetry editor at flipped eye publishing. He has provided support and mentorship for successive generations of poets through Roundhouse Poets, Barbican Young Poets, the Spoken Word Education programme, The Writing Room and other developmental initiatives across the UK. Jacob has also served as the inaugural Poetry Fellow for English Heritage, Poet-in-Residence at Raffles Institution (Singapore), and poetry professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His collection Breaking Silence (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) was shortlisted for Fenton Aldeburgh and Forward Poetry prizes.

Patience Agbabi FRSL is a celebrated poet, performer, mentor and novelist. Since 2008, she has been a Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University, and she is currently Associate Member of the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Patience was Canterbury Laureate from 2009 to 2010 and received a Grant for the Arts and an Authors Foundation Grant to write a contemporary version of The Canterbury Tales. Her fourth collection, Telling Tales, was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and Wales Book of the Year 2015. In 2016 she contributed a poem ‘The Refugee’s Tale’ to The Refugee Tales, the first collection of the series and participated in a reverse pilgrimage walk from Canterbury to London to raise awareness around asylum seekers’ issues.

1. Newcastle University will not accept responsibility for prize entries that are lost, mislaid, damaged or delayed in transit, regardless of cause, including (for example) technical malfunction, or systems, network, server or computer hardware or software failure of any kind.
2. Under no circumstances can alterations be made to poems once entered prior to judging but poems in the winning portfolios may be altered in the course of the mentoring and publication processes. 
3. Applicants may withdraw entries from the competition.
4. Email confirmation of receipt will be available to every recipient. We are unable to confirm the content of documents submitted, so please ensure you submit the correct version.
5. Proof of transmission will not be accepted as proof of receipt of entry to the competition.
6. Due to the large number of applicants, we are unable to give feedback to submissions.
7. Applicants must not have a contract with a literary agent which would prevent them from agreeing to the publication contract for the mentored book-length collection offered to the three winning applicants by Bloodaxe Books, including the level of advance (£1000), royalty rates, sales territories and the publisher’s standard offer of subsidiary rights. In the event that they do have a contract with a literary agent, they must undertake to remove the mentored book-length collection from the remit of that agent’s contract.
8. The prize organisers reserve the right to change the judging panel without notice and not to award prizes if, in the judges’ opinion, such an action is justified.
9. The first round of judging will be focused on the poetry submissions. Later rounds will use personal statements and CVs to judge the applicant’s suitability for mentoring at this particular stage in their work. The judges’ panel decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into concerning this decision.
10. The Equal Opportunity Monitoring Forms will be separately processed and will not be seen by judges during the submission process. The answers will be anonymized, gathered as statistics, and will be studied by the organisers to reach new communities in the future.
11. All winners will be notified by end of September 2024. Winners are expected to provide a short biography and photograph for publicity purposes. Winners will be asked to take part in the James Berry Poetry Prize reading at Newcastle University.
12. The copyright of each poem remains with the author. However, authors of the winning poems, in submitting their work for the prize, grant , the right to publish and/or broadcast poems from their portfolios for the period of copyright.
13. Winners will be asked to sign a contract for the publication of their mentored first book-length collection with Bloodaxe Books Ltd, with an advance against royalties split 50:50 between signature and publication. In the event that the mentored collection is not deemed suitable for publication, the signature instalment of the advance will be retained by the winner but the publication instalment will not be paid.
14. Winners who fail to sign the publication contract will be disqualified and an alternative winner will be chosen instead.
15. Mentors will be allocated to the winners by Newcastle University.

 Publicity and Personal Information

Personal information (including any photographs) supplied by applicants when entering or winning this competition will only be used by us in accordance with our privacy policy.

Bloodaxe Books and Newcastle University are pleased to announce the shortlist for the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024. Three equal winners will be chosen from the shortlist of six, with the winning poets announced at a special online reading to be held on Wednesday 20 November 2024. 

The prize was judged by Imtiaz Dharker, Major Jackson, Nathalie Teitler, Theresa Muñoz, and Neil Astley. The judges received almost 100 submissions and were delighted with the high quality of the entries. 

Nine of the poets who most impressed the judges will read at a free online event run by Bloodaxe Books with Newcastle University on Wednesday 20 November at 7pm (details below). The six shortlisted and three commended poets will read from their work ahead of the announcement of the three joint equal winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024. The three winners will each receive £1000 plus a year’s mentoring (by Patience Agbabi, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Jacob Sam-La Rose) towards the publication of their debut collections with Bloodaxe Books in 2026. The event will be hosted by Theresa Muñoz with Imtiaz Dharker.
 
Shortlist 
Clementine Ewokolo Burnley 
Nadine El-Enany 
Roshni Gallagher 
Amina Jama 
Ilisha Thiru Purcell 
Fae Wolfe 

Commended poets 
Lillian Akampurira Aujo 
Christy Ku 
Wendelin Law 

Lillian Akampurira Aujo is a writer from Uganda. Her writing has been published by HarperVia, New Internationalist, Prairie Schooner, Transition Magazine, among others. She is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing (Poetry) programme at the University of East Anglia, where she was a Global Voices Scholar. 
 
Clementine Ewokolo Burnley was born in Cameroon and now lives and works between the UK and Germany. She has an MSc in Applied Linguistics from Manchester University. Her work has been published in Ink Sweat and Tears, Magma, and The Poetry Review. Clementine’s first pamphlet, Radical Pairings, was published by Ignition Press in 2023. 
 
Nadine El-Enany is a writer and poet. Her 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. 
 
Roshni Gallagher is a poet from Leeds living in Edinburgh. Her debut pamphlet Bird Cherry was published in 2023 by Verve Poetry Press. In 2022 she won an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She's currently studying for an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of St Andrews. 
 
Amina Jama is a Somali writer, producer and curator from East London. Her work explores sonic resonances of archival materials, displacement, migration and community engagement. Her pamphlet, A Warning to the House that Holds Me, published by flipped eye press, received a 2020 Eric Gregory Award. 
 
Christy Ku is a poet, actor and workshop facilitator. She’s worked with organisations including the BBC, Sky Arts, Science Museum, and the Barbican on projects such as poetry films, spoken word tracks and theatre shows. She founded BESEA Poets, a platform for British-based East and South-East Asian poets. 
 
Ilisha Thiru Purcell is an award-winning Sri Lankan-Scottish poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. She was part of the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator Programme and was a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North. Her work has appeared in publications such as Bi+ Lines Anthology, Butcher’s Dog, and Third Space Anthology. 
 
Wendelin Law writes about historical trauma, the oppression of women, and family stories. Her goal is to publish symbolic poetry books that act as reminders of humanitarian crises and social injustice. She is the co-winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2024. 
 
Fae Wolfe lives in Manchester. She is pursuing a doctorate in counselling psychology and is interested in how storytelling emerges from the body. Her poems have appeared with The London Magazine, Aurora Prize for writing, Button Poetry, The Bitchin Kitsch, and Raising Mothers: Celebrating Black, Indigenous & Brown parenthood.

Online event hosted by Bloodaxe Books and Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts 

Readings by the six poets shortlisted for the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024, along with the three commended poets. 

You can watch the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize event live or later on the Bloodaxe Books YouTube channel, or via this link: https://youtube.com/live/HhuB8YR8b_4. Register for this free online reading via TicketTailor before noon on 19 November if you would like to receive reminder emails about the event: https://buytickets.at/bloodaxebooks/1403223. 

The three equal winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 will be announced during this online event, which will be hosted by judges Theresa Muñoz and Imtiaz Dharker.