News

Clive Watkins Wins Third Prize in the 2022 John Dryden Translation Competition

The Waywiser Press is pleased to announce that Clive Watkins, one our founding editors and author of Jigsaw (2003) and Already the Flames (2014), has won third prize in the 2021 – 2022 John Dryden Translation Competition for The Occasions: Seventeen Poems translated from Eugenio Montale’s Italian text Le Occasioni. The large field spanned thirty-six languages from across the globe. The competition is sponsored by the British Comparative Literature Association and the British Centre for Literary Translation and is hosted by the University of Leeds. This is particularly gratifying given Waywiser’s recent publication of Late Montale, George Bradley’s translated selection of poems from the last decades of Montale’s life.

To read the official announcement, please click on the following link: 2022 John Dryden Translation Competition Results. You will need to scroll down the page to reach the results.

 

RIP Anthony Thwaite

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

16th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize Results Announced

To see the results of the 16th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, announced in March 2021, with sample poems by, and biographical notes about most of the poets who reached the contest’s final stages, please click

Chris Andrews wins the TLS’s Mick Imlah Poetry Prize (2019)

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.

15th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize – Closed

anthony-hecth-prize-logo-15th

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.

i.m. Al Alvarez, born 5 August 1929, died 23 September 2019

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.

 

14th Annual Hecht Poetry Prize – Closed

hplogo14

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.

Clive Watkins wins the 2018 Robert Graves Poetry Prize

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

Book publication — March 15 2019

March 15, 2019:

— UK Publication of Christopher Cessac’s Hecht-Prize winning The Youngest Ocean

— UK publication of Pulitzer Prize finalist Morri Creech’s Blue Rooms

Categories
Archives