Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022
The following prizewinning poems were chosen by our 2022 judges, Victoria Kennefick & Joshua Bennett, & announced at Troubadour International Poetry Prize Night Online on Mon 5 Dec 2022 (see judges’ reports & poems below).
- First Prize, £2,000, My Grandfather’s Car, Jonathan Edwards, Crosskeys, Gwent
- Second Prize, £1000, Folds, Anna Crowe, St Andrews, Fife
- Third Prize, £500, A Change of Scene, Robert Maslen, Bradford, West Yorkshire
Commended poems:
- Mary, Amelia Loulli, Penrith, Cumbria
- Ossory Road, 1980, AM Cousins, Wexford
- Bone and Foliage, Ben McGuire, Bray, Co. Wicklow
- My Father Said ‘Given a Chance, Nature Wants to Heal’, Christina Hutchins, Albany, California
- Trans Man Buttons Up His Shirt (After Giving Away All His Dresses Invisibility At A Garage Sale), Court Castaños, Woodacre, California
- The National Audubon Society’s Singing Bird Clock, Craig Martin Getz, Barcelona
- Hold me Like Your iPhone, Deborah Finding, Chiswick, London
- The Remains, Dillon Jaxx, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex
- Half-Blind, Elizabeth Herron, Graton, California
- Last Tuesday, Jo Davis, Walthamstow, London
- A Poem That Grew from a Mistranslation of Some of the First Lines of the Poems in Claribel Alegría’s Sorrow, Judy Crowe, Nevada City, California
- Algebra, Kate Scott, Bridport, Dorset
- Montage, Kayleigh Campbell, Castleford, Yorkshire
- Return to Germanika, Greece Without You, Lisa Dart, Eastbourne, East Sussex
- Did You Write?, Mark Fiddes, Dubai, UAE
- The Daughter Calls, Nessa O’Mahony, Dublin
- July, Nicholas Hogg, Leicester, East Midlands
- To Sir William Gull, Nicola Healey, Buckinghamshire
- Kensington Central Library (Red), Sara Nesbitt Gibbons, Carshalton, Surrey
- Turning Twenty-Five in a Noah Baumbach Film, Vasvi Kejriwal, Clerkenwell, London
2022 judges’ reports
Victoria Kennefick writes…
I think everyone should have the opportunity to judge a poetry competition, the submitted poems form a secret portal of sorts into the collective unconscious of a large group of people – in the case of the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, a cast of thousands! What a snapshot of interior human experience and what a privilege and honour it was to have the opportunity to read the poems, hear the voices, follow the language, and peek at the issues, insecurities, joys, horrors and hopes of us all. I was moved and amazed by the variety, scope, and ambition of the work we received. I fell in love with the words and the emotions the poems invoked in me, crying with a poem, laughing with one too. There were poems about birds – each one
Read full judges' reports, & 2022 prize–winning & commended poems