It was with great sadness that we learned of Anthony Thwaite’s death, age 90, on April 22, 2021. Mr Thwaite, a distinguished poet, editor and critic, judged the tenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for us in 2015, and flew to Washington D.C. to present the prize to its winner, Jaimee Hills, and to read alongside her in the city’s Folger Shakespeare Library — a memorable and well-attended occasion. Our condolences go to his wife Anne and their four daughters.

To read a full obituary, please click on this link: Eric Homberger’s obituary of Anthony Thwaite, The Guardian, 23.4.21

Katherine Hollander, whose My German Dictionary won the fourteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, which was published by Waywiser in the autumn of 2019, has been commissioned by Bloomsbury/Methuen to edit and write a new introduction and notes for a student edition of one of Bertolt Brecht’s best-known plays, Mother Courage and Her Children.

Chris Andrews, whose Lime Green Chair was awarded the seventh annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and published by Waywiser in 2012 has been declared winner of the the Mick Imlah Poetry Prize for his poem, “This is the Crow with the Broken Caw”. As well as seeing his poem published in in the TLS (December 20, 2019), Chris receives a purse of £3,000. The TLS‘s deputy editor, Alan Jenkins, speaking as one of the contest’s three judges, writes that “This is …” struck us with its play between the mechanical and the natural, between the empire of development (and its ruins), and the ecosphere it is encroaching on; the sense the poem conveys “of human and non-human lives going on at the same time but at different speeds, instigating little eruptions in the narrative”, as [his fellow judge] Karen [Solie] said. All of us took pleasure in the details of this Australian (sub?)urban pastoral, and in its solid construction and vivid phrasing.” Our congratulations go to Chris, of whom his fellow countryman Chris Wallace-Crabbe has rightly said, Alert and sparkling, my fellow poet … has an eye for every small thing in our modern cities: and the words for it.

The December 1st deadline for the fifteenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize has now passed, and the judging process is underway. The contest’s results will be posted on the press’s website – at The Waywiser Press – in March 2020.

This portal will re-open for submissions to the next Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in August 2020.

It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Al Alvarez, whose New & Selected Poems (2002) was one of Waywiser’s earliest publications. Al, who was born ninety years ago, in 1929,  was that increasingly rare thing, an all-round man of letters — not just a poet, but a critic, memoirist, writer of non-fiction, and journalist. He was also a man in love with risk, as his exploits as rock-climber and poker-player amply attested.

A well-rounded appreciation is to be found in John Sutherland’s obituary for The Guardian, which can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/23/al-alvarez-obituary.

Marzena Pogorzaly

The December 1st deadline for the fourteenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize has now passed, and the judging process is underway. The contest’s results will be posted on the press’s website – at The Waywiser Press – in March 2019.

This portal will re-open for submissions to the 15th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize on August 1st 2019.

The Waywiser Press is pleased to announce that Clive Watkins, author of Jigsaw (2003) and Already the Flames (2014), has won the 2018 Robert Graves Poetry Prize for his poem Mirror, Mirror. The prize of £1000 is offered by the Roehampton Poetry Centre, Roehampton University, London, in conjunction with the Wimbledon Bookfest to honour the poet, novelist and critic, Robert Graves. The judges were the poet David Harsent and the literary agent Peter Straus. They commented that Mirror, Mirror was marked out by its sure touch with image and its controlled narrative tension. It will appear in the near future in Roehampton Poetry Centre’s magazine, Poem. (Another of Clive’s poems was also included in the short-list.) The official announcement can be found at: Robert Graves Poetry Prize, 2018