Katherine Pierpoint has won the £2,000 Troubadour international poetry competition prize with her poem ‘The Egg-Slicer’, it was announced on Monday night. One of the prize judges, Imtiaz Dharker, said: “Katherine Pierpoint takes something which could be mundane, an egg-slicer, and gives it such close attention that it becomes almost mythical.”

Co-judge Michael Symmons Roberts added that the winning poem “begins quietly, then builds to a musical crescendo evoking the weirdly beautiful sound of its ‘tiny falsetto’, its ‘zithery tunes’ …  I loved it.”

Runner-up was Suzanne Cleary, from Peekskill, New York, with ‘The Secret of Happiness’. Third was Lindsey Holland, from Ormskirk, Lancashire, with ‘Confession of a Need to Know.’ You can read the winning poems, and see the full list of prizewinners and their poems on the Coffee-House Poetry website here.