Callum McKean is a curator at the British Library working with literary archives and manuscripts from the post-war period to the present day. Since June 2021, he has led on the Library’s acquisition and research into the personal digital archives of writers, poets and other prominent individuals in contemporary public life.
Manuela Pellegrino is a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University. She holds a PhD in anthropology from University College of London. Through her current project on ethnographic poetry, she conceptualises and uses writing poetry in Griko, a minority language of Greek origins.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of the collection The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) and the pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He is also the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020).
Julia Copus is a poet and biographer. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Girlhood (Faber 2019), was winner of the inaugural Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Her awards include First Prize in the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for ‘An Easy Passage’.
Sir Nicholas Penny was Director of the National Gallery, London from 2008 to 2015. Other positions have included lecturer in art history at the University of Manchester, Keeper of the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Clore Curator of Renaissance Painting at the National Gallery London, and Senior Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
The Wordsworth Trust and The British Library, with the generous support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, present The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, in partnership with The TLS and Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS), in Washington DC and in Nafplio, Greece. The Awards are also in association with National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales.
The Awards aim to raise the profile of poetry pamphlets, recognising the enormous contribution they make to the world of poetry.
There will be three Awards in 2021:
The Michael Marks Poetry Award recognises an outstanding poetry pamphlet published in the UK between March 1st 2020 and the closing date of September 17th 2021. The judges will take into account the quality of the pamphlet as well as the poetry.
Prize
The winning poet will receive a cheque for £5,000. They will also be given the opportunity to be Poet in Residence with the Harvard Alumni Association/Center for Hellenic Studies ‘Spring Break to Greece’. The residency will take place in spring/summer 2022, exact date to be confirmed.
The Michael Marks Publishers’ Award recognises an outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form, based on their publishing programme March 1st 2020 and the closing date of September 17th 2021. The judges will take into account the publishers’ philosophy, aims, plans, design ethos and marketing strategy as well as the quality of the poetry.
Prize
The winning publisher will receive a cheque for £5,000.
The Michael Marks Illustration Award will recognise outstanding illustration of a poetry pamphlet published between March 1st 2020 and the closing date of September 17th 2021. The judge will consider illustration in any medium and will be looking for a subtle and sustained relationship between image and text, as well as the overall quality of the images.
Prize
The winning illustrator will receive a cheque for £1,000.
Closing date for submissions: 4.00pm Friday September 17th 2021.
The closing date is strict and no entries received after this date will be considered.
The Awards will be celebrated at a special dinner featuring the shortlisted poets and publishers, at the British Library on Tuesday 7th December 2021. A virtual event will be accessible in the case of the actual event being infeasible.
The winners of the Michael Marks Greek Bicentennial Poetry Pamphlet Prizes will also be celebrated at this event.
“These inspired awards recognise that the pamphlet has a fundamental importance in literary culture far exceeding anything suggested by the dictionary – “a brief publication, generally having a paper cover”. For many of the best poets now writing it was not only their first means of distribution but the first ratification of their gift.
