Denise Riley wins £5,000 Roehampton Poetry Centre prize
Denise Riley has won the £5,000 Roehampton poetry prize for her collection, Say Something Back, which documents grieving and loss. It had previously been shortlisted for both the Forward and TS Eliot prizes.
Say Something Back includes ‘A Part Song’, one of the most widely admired long poems of recent years. Reviewing the collection for Write Out Loud, Terence Dooley said: “The collection begins with ‘A Part Song’, winner of the Forward single poem prize in 2012 … It is a landmark long poem or sequence of recent years, one of those poems everyone remembers reading for the first time. What is so extraordinary about it is its tone, a fond, intimate, almost humorous one-sided conversation with her son.”
The prize is organised by the Roehampton Poetry Centre, at the University of Roehampton. The judges were Ahren Warner and Elaine Feinstein, and they were chaired by Fiona Sampson, director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre.
Ahren Warner said Riley's collection was “a deserving and formidable winner. It is an outstanding, intellectually rigorous, moving and yet generous book in which Riley frames her formal ambition and seriousness of purpose with both wit and a compelling sense of humanity.”
PHOTOGRAPH: ROSE RILEY
Dominic James
Thu 29th Jun 2017 22:36
I don't know MC, "seriousness of purpose with both wit and a compelling sense of humanity" sounds good enough for me. There's always room for humour, I think: though it would have to be more than funny to be marked above everything else. From the reports above Denise Riley certainly sounds like a deserving winner: should we read the work??