Trinidad-born Vahni Capildeo has won the £15,000 Forward prize with her collection of poetry and prose-poems Measures of Expatriation, published by Carcanet. Capildeo has lived in the UK since 1991, winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where she studied Old Norse before working as an etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary.

Malika Booker, chair of the five-strong judging panel, said: “Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation is a work that amazes … When people in the future seek to know what it’s like to live between places, traditions, habits and cultures, they will read this. Here is the language for what expatriation feels like.” Another judge, Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, compared Capildeo’s work to that of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Capildeo herself spoke of her shock at winning the prize, and said she was still reeling after flying in from Kenya earlier that day. She follows two Jamaican-born poets, Kei Miller and Claudia Rankine, who took the main Forward prize respectively in 2014 and 2015.

The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000) went to Tiphanie Yanique for Wife (Peepal Tree Press), while the Forward prize for best single poem (£1,000) was awarded to Sasha Dugdale for ‘Joy’ (PN Review). William Sieghart, the prizes’ founder, said: “I welcome the judges’ decisions to celebrate work that excites them, that delights in finding new ways to express what it is to speak and listen in an age of global English.”

The prizes were awarded at the Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre, with readings from each of the shortlisted collections, introduced by William Sieghart and Malika Booker. The panel also included poets George Szirtes and Liz Berry, plus singer-songwriter Tracey Thorn, and Don Share.

Tiphanie Yanique, awarded the Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection, was born in St Thomas in the Virgin Islands. She told the Forward audience: “I come from a very tiny island called St Thomas in the Caribbean. My mother and my grandmother were both librarians and they both wrote poetry, but they didn’t publish any books.” Don Share said of her collection: “She writes of elopement, and estrangement, of coming together and separating, but always, always, of surviving.” Yanique now lives and works in the US.

Sasha Dugdale, editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, was awarded the best single poem prize for ‘Joy’, a long poem that was first published in the magazine PN Review. Malika Booker said: “Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Joy’ is an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing. A poetic drama, complete with stage directions, it is addictive writing, compelling and tender. It presents the death of Wiliam Blake, as retold by Catherine, his widow. As she re-tells and re-experiences his death, she re-experiences their life together, her sense of herself and her own creative potential.”

Malika Booker said that the final Forward prize judging decisions were “passionately debated and deliberated on” at a meeting earlier in the day. She added: “I’m from the Caribbean, and when times get tough you need to ask for rum. [The difficulty of] our sober deliberations encouraged an alcoholic craving!”  

A special announcement was also made to mark the Forward Arts Foundation’s 25th anniversary celebrations, with the launch of the first Forward Prizes Studentship. It will support a young poet from Afghanistan, Shukria Rezaei, aged 18, who knew no English on arrival in the UK four years ago but has since won several awards for her poetry.

The studentship will enable Shukria to stay on an extra year at Oxford Spires Academy, where she will work as a teaching assistant, mentor younger students and encourage the creative and critical reading and writing of poetry throughout the school. Money raised to support her will also enable the Forward Arts Foundation to extend pioneering poetry work with migrants, refugees and other disadvantaged children that has been piloted by Shukria’s teacher, the poet Kate Clanchy, and her colleagues at Oxford Spires Academy.

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Background: Countdown to night marking 25 years of the Forward prizes