James Berry Poetry Prize
The James Berry Poetry Prize will assist poets of colour with talent ready to take their work to the next level via mentoring and publication.
The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021.
Marjorie Lotfi, Kaycee Hill and Yvette Siegert were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize in October 2021.
The James Berry Poetry Prize will assist young and/or emerging writers of colour with mentoring to help them develop their work, followed by publication of their debut book-length collection with Bloodaxe Books. Devised by Bernardine Evaristo, OBE, and Nathalie Teitler, the prize is modelled on The Complete Works mentoring programme previously supported by Arts Council England.
The prize is free to enter. It is open to poets of colour who have not yet published a book-length collection, with special consideration given to LGBTQ+/disabled poets and poets from underrepresented backgrounds. It is the first national poetry prize to include both mentoring and book publication.
A panel of judges will choose three equal winning poets. Each year the winning poets will be invited to take part in an annual James Berry Poetry Prize reading as part of the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts events series.
The prize is generously funded this year by Bloodaxe Books covered by uplift in NPO grants specifically for inclusivity projects and run in partnership with Newcastle University.
James Berry (1927-2017)
The prize is named in honour of James Berry, OBE one of the first black writers in Britain to receive wider recognition. He emigrated from Jamaica in 1948, and took a job with British Telecom, where he spent much of his working life until he was able to support himself from his writing. He rose to prominence in 1981 when he won the National Poetry Competition.
His numerous books included two seminal anthologies of Caribbean-British poetry, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (Chatto & Windus, 1981), and A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), drawing on five earlier collections including Windrush Songs (2007), published to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
How to enter
Applicants must submit a portfolio of 10 to 12 pages of poems, a personal statement and CV. The personal statement must include your name, address, phone number and email, plus please include answers to all three questions below:
- How would winning the James Berry Poetry Prize benefit you?
- What qualities are you looking for in a mentorship and how will it help you?
- How did you discover poetry in your life and what does it mean to you?
The CV should be two A4 pages maximum and include publications, readings, performances, previous mentoring experiences, CW degrees, teaching, editing, reviews and any relevant professional work.
The portfolio of 10 to 12 pages of poetry must be the applicant’s original work and may have been published previously in a pamphlet, journal, anthology, online, YouTube, etc, as long as acknowledgement is made.
Please submit your entry in TWO separate documents: -
- Portfolio
- CV and personal statement (in one document)
All files must be either a .doc, .docx or .pdf. Entries must be written in English, can be on any subject and written in any style or form.
To note applicants can only submit one entry to the competition.
Please email all queries and completed applications to Theresa Muñoz at Theresa.munoz@ncl.ac.uk. Deadline for applications is 31 July 2024.
Shortlisted poets and winners will be notified by the end of September 2024.
Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She is the author of two poetry collections, an innovative verse novel Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024) and the editor of seven literary anthologies, including Nature Matters, co-edited with Mona Arshi (Faber, 2025). In 2019 she moved to Los Angeles as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar and Writer in Residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA, exploring the relationship between poetry, law and language. This research forms the basis of her new poetry collection Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Jacob Sam-La Rose is a poet, facilitator, programme leader, artistic director and poetry editor at flipped eye publishing. He has provided support and mentorship for successive generations of poets through Roundhouse Poets, Barbican Young Poets, the Spoken Word Education programme, The Writing Room and other developmental initiatives across the UK. Jacob has also served as the inaugural Poetry Fellow for English Heritage, Poet-in-Residence at Raffles Institution (Singapore), and poetry professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His collection Breaking Silence (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) was shortlisted for Fenton Aldeburgh and Forward Poetry prizes.
Patience Agbabi FRSL is a celebrated poet, performer, mentor and novelist. Since 2008, she has been a Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University, and she is currently Associate Member of the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Patience was Canterbury Laureate from 2009 to 2010 and received a Grant for the Arts and an Authors Foundation Grant to write a contemporary version of The Canterbury Tales. Her fourth collection, Telling Tales, was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and Wales Book of the Year 2015. In 2016 she contributed a poem ‘The Refugee’s Tale’ to The Refugee Tales, the first collection of the series and participated in a reverse pilgrimage walk from Canterbury to London to raise awareness around asylum seekers’ issues.
Imtiaz Dharker FRSL is a poet, artist and video film maker. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014 and is Chancellor of Newcastle University. Her seven collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Shadow Reader. Her poems have featured widely on BBC radio, television, the London Underground, Glasgow billboards and Mumbai buses. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and also scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee and is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.
Nathalie Teitler Hon FRSL is the Director of the Complete Works Poetry, founded by Bernardine Evaristo OBE, a mentoring and development programme that has had a significant impact on the level of Black, Asian & Latinx poets published by major UK publishers. Born in Argentina, she is also the co-founder of Nuevo Sol – A New Sun – (along with poet Leo Boix), an organisation promoting British Latinx and Latinx/ Latin American writers around the world. In 2017, she also founded a dance poetry organisation: Dancing Words that has made a series of poetry dance films that have been seen at festivals around the world. She is currently working on a tango-based novel, set in Buenos Aires in 1900.
Neil Astley Hon FRSL is the editor of Bloodaxe Books which he founded in 1978. His books include many anthologies, most notably those in the Staying Alive series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020), along with four collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food, Soul Feast, and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, and has published two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, as well as two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World.
Theresa Muñoz is Director of the Newcastle Poetry Festival and Research Associate in Contemporary Poetry at Newcastle University. She has published one collection of poetry, Settle, which shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been published in international journals such as Canadian Literature, Poetry Review and Southword. She has been awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, a Muriel Spark Centenary Award and a Creative Scotland Award and shortlisted for The Kavya Prize, Scotland’s only award for writers of colour.