Forward Prize Shortlists 2023
Selected by the Bookshop
This year’s shortlists for the most influential prize in poetry have been announced! Find out more about the books nominated for Best Collection and Best First Collection below, or head to the Forward Prizes website to see who made shortlists for Best Single Poem – Written and Best Single Poem – Performed.
From the publisher:
The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023Jason Allen-Paisant's debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021.…
From the publisher:
This keenly anticipated new collection from the Costa Poetry Award-winner speaks ‘out of fear and grief into splendour and joy’.Following their award-winning debut, Flèche (2019), comes Mary Jean Chan’s…
From the publisher:
Jane Clarke's third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and…
From the publisher:
In his disquieting third collection The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his…
From the publisher:
Sennitt Clough’s twisty fen-Gothic narratives are filled with macabre imagery and sexual violence. Imagine a monstrous fair that has arrived in deepest Cambridgeshire, only to discover that the inhabitants are far more frightening…
From the publisher:
The much-anticipated debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey, on the subject of our cultural obsession with true crime.ISDAL is a timely interrogation of the true crime genre. In the first of its three parts, we…
From the publisher:
An award-winning poet explodes the notion of translation, showing us the poem in a supple, malleable form'Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating…
From the publisher:
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY WINTER CHOICE‘a joyous liberatory dance against oppression’ — Roger RobinsonCane, Corn & Gully is a genealogical and autobiographical collection which unites dance and poetry to observe,…
From the publisher:
Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.'A once in a generation poet'CALEB FEMI, author of POOR'Energising, radical and remarkable'JACK UNDERWOOD, author HAPPINESS'A new turn in global anglophone poetry'KAYO…
From the publisher:
The poems in Cowboy are knowing, millennial, internet-sick, funny, with deep currents – of embodied and disembodied spiritualities; familial mythologies; grief and longing; navigating diagnoses; early and enduring disappointment; the…
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