Forward Prize Articles
Momtaza Mehri – How I Did It ‘A Few Facts We Hesitantly Know to Be Somewhat True’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection to write about the inspiration behind their collection. Here’s Momtaza Mehri on what inspired her to write Bad Diaspora Poems. This was one of a series of poems I…
Momtaza Mehri
Eric Yip – How I Did It ‘Fricatives’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written) to write about the inspiration behind their poem. Here’s Eric Yip on what inspired him to write ‘Frictatives.’ Thinking about a poem after having written it feels like…
Eric Yip
Michael Pedersen – How I Did It ‘The Cat Prince’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Michael Pedersen on what inspired him to write ‘The Cat Prince‘. ‘The Cat…
Michael Pedersen
Jane Clarke – How I Did It ‘Pit Ponies of Glendasan’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Jane Clarke on what inspired her to write A Change in the Air. On a…
Jane Clarke
Kit Fan – How I Did It ‘2047: A Hong Kong Space Odyssey’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Kit on what inspired him to write The Ink Cloud Reader. My Hong Kong childhood…
Kit Fan
How I Did It: ‘protest of the physical’
The long poem which makes up the centre of physical took about two years to write and then another three to sculpt into the version that exists in this collection. Around 2010 three things happened; I graduated from undergraduate study, I found out I’d got a grant to go on a free Arvon course and,…
Andrew McMillanHow I Did It: ‘The Ballad of the Small-Boned Daughter’
Shafilea Ahmed died in September 2003 aged 17. She was a British Pakistani girl from Warrington, Cheshire. She was a beautiful and spirited girl who was murdered in a so called ‘honour killing’ by her parents. Like so many others I watched the long gruesome trial in 2012 when her parents were finally convicted of…
Mona ArshiHow I Did It: ‘Mort-Dieu’
It’s tempting to look at the title poem of An Aviary of Small Birds, as it not only expresses a literary influence (in particular, the poem references a mythical bird the Octobrine as coined by Pablo Neruda) but also encapsulates the high note I was reaching for, as a lyric and an elegy. However, the…
Karen McCarthy Woolf