Announcing The Poetry School / Pighog Poetry Pamphlet Competition Winner!

Pighog and The Poetry School are delighted to announce the winner of our second annual pamphlet competition.

Judges Simon Barraclough and Catherine Smith whittled down more than 600 entries to a shortlist of thirteen, then awarded the first place in the competition to …

Natacha Bryan for her pamphlet If I talked everything my eyes saw

London-based Natacha is a writer, poet and mindfulness based workshop facilitator. Her work has been published in Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Iota and forthcoming in Urthorna.

Catherine and Simon noted ‘The final judging is excruciating because it is essentially an elimination round – but the pleasure lies in revisiting all these poems and sharing thoughts and ideas about them’. They enthused about Natacha’s ‘incredibly fresh and vigorous imagery’ and how they were ‘charmed, enchanted, intrigued and absorbed by her love of language’

‘It was summer and the heat made everything blurry
just like the windows of Alvin’s truck covered in sheets of water
me cuffing an arm to clear a streak so he could see.
I wanted to crack a window but I wasn’t even supposed to be there
under the dinner table, spying through the legs of a chair.
It was a strange noise, coming from a person, anyway,
the same as the radio would give on trips to Mandeville
static making me crave fried snapper in garlic
but the hiss coming from Elsie told me
something terrible was about to happen …’

an extract of Elsie from the winning pamphlet

Natacha now begins the process of preparing her pamphlet for publication with John Davies, Pighog editor.

This year’s Runners-Up –  Sarah Barnsley for The Fire Station and Katie Griffiths for My Shrink is Pregnant – each win a selection of Poetry School courses.

Both Pighog and the Poetry School share a desire to support the development of poets and poetry readers: they work with poetry lovers at all levels from undiscovered talent to seasoned habitué. Their competition sees them join forces to explore the potential of the pamphlet genre and to encourage writers to create innovative and exciting new work. Last year’s winner Kate White published her pamphlet The Old Madness with Pighog – a publication which went on to receive the Poetry Book Society’s quarterly Pamphlet Choice award.

The next step: the launch of 2015’s competition!