We are very pleased to announce the shortlist for the Frederik van Eeden Poetry Competition award.
Nine poems were chosen from a total of 226 poems that were sent in from over 29 different countries. We have invited poet Stephen Watts to make the final selection.
The winner will receive £100 and the winning poem will be published in our online magazine.
The winning entry will be announced on 24th of September.
The Shortlist
The Gargoyle – Gemma Brookes, Cannock, England
Sustenance – Rachel Sawaya, Auckland, New Zealand
Treasured Memories – Rosemary Gemmell, Longbank, Scotland
What Came First – Penny Boxall, Grasmere, England
The Space before the House – David Gill, Earls Barton, England
Sandstorm – Shirley Elmokadem, Horsham, England
Island Bays – Venetia Ghozlan, Palmyra, NY, USA
Acrostic – Tanja Cilia, Santa Venera, Malta
Stephen Watts is an established poet, translator, editor and bibliographer.
He has published three poetry collections: The Lava’s Curl (Grimaldi Press, 1990), Gramsci & Caruso (Periplum, 2004) and The Blue Bag (Aark Arts, 2005).
Some of his poems have been translated into Czech, Finnish, Italian, Persian, and Spanish. Stephen has also translated work from Kurdish, Persian, Slovenian and Yiddish poets including Ziba Karbassi, Avrom Stencl and Meta KuÌÉåÁar (Arc Publications 2010).
Stephen has edited several anthologies including: Voices of Conscience, a collection of censored poets from across the world (Iron Press, 1995), Mother Tongues, which was a special issue of Modern Poetry in Translation in 2001, and Music While Drowning, a selection of Expressionist poems from Germany to accompany an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London (Tate Publishing, 2003). Most recently he edited Amarjit Chandan’s Sonata For Four Hands (Arc Publications 2010).
Born in 1952 in London he has an English-Swiss-Italian background and close ties to Scotland. Stephen now lives in London’s East End.
He is a very busy man and in addition to judging our competition he is working on several projects most notably an online bibliography of 20th Century Poetry in English translation, a new edition of Mother Tongues (Bloodaxe Books, due 2010) and prose about his grandfather’s migration from the Italian Alps and his neighbourhood Whitechapel.
