The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Winners of the 2006 Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Winners: 

First Prize, £5,000: John Goodby from Swansea for The Uncles        

Second Prize, £500: Candy Neubert from Dartington in Devon for Resurrection

Third Prize, £250: Judy Brown from London for Marbles

Runners Up, winning £50 each:

Laura Helyer from St Andrews in Fife for The Heron

Sue Hubbard from London for Symmetry

Elizabeth Gowing from London for Annuraaq

Colin Sutherill from Bakewell in Derbyshire for Morgan’s Guitar Break

Carol Anne Zlotowitz from Beeston in Nottinghamshire for The Moth

Winner: John Goodby

 The Judges

The judges for the 2006 competition were poets Adrian Mitchell and Hilary Llewellyn–Williams.

Adrian Mitchell was born near Hampstead Heath in 1932. He was educated in Hell and Heaven. After a spall on newspapers he quit journalism in the mid-Sixties. Since then he has been a free-falling writer of poems, novels, TV and stage plays for adults and children. His books of poems include Heart on the Left, Blue Coffee and The Shadow Knows (all published by Bloodaxe Books). Orchard Books publish his poems for children - Balloow Lagoon and recently Daft as a Doughnut, which was chosen by the Poetry Book Society as the best single-author collection of children’s poems in 2004. Adrian has been appointed the Shadow Poet Laureatge by Red Pepper magazine. He lives with his wife Celia and Daisy the Dog of Peace near Hampstead Heath.

Hilary Llewellyn-Williams was born in Kent, and lived in many different places before moving her home to Wales in 1982. She has been writing poetry most of her life, with her first published piece at age 11. She has won the Cardiff Literature Prize, and came joint third in the Arvon / Observer Poetry Competition in 1994. She currently works as a freelance tutor in creative writing. Her most recent poetry collection is Greenland (Seren, 2003).

Adjudication
The judges adjudication, read by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams at the prize-giving in Cardiff 11 May 2006

I’m very glad to be here in Cardiff tonight, to join this celebration of poetry. Poems are meant to be shared and enjoyed within a community ¬that was their original function, and it’s still an important aspect of any poet’s work - reaching and connecting with an audience. This can sometimes be difficult, given all the competing media in the world these days - how can you get your voice heard? One way that many established poets today first found recognition was through a poetry competition. Not only does winning a major prize give publicity – and maybe some very useful cash! - it also gives encouragement and a great boost of confidence in the worthwhile-ness of this craft of poetry, which all too often doesn’t seem to provide many tangible rewards. So I hope that all the prizewinners of this year’s Cardiff International Poetry Competition will be encouraged by this recognition of their talent to continue to produce valuable poetry for all of us, to share with all of us, ¬this very human creation of magical language

This is a long established competition with a great reputation and it is only possible due to the generous funding towards the prizes from Cardiff Council – so many thanks to them for that.

I judged this year’s competition with the long-established poet Adrian Mitchell, who some may remember from the Liverpool poetry scene in the late 60s. He and I are very different poets, and yet I was interested to discover that when it came to making our shortlists for this competition he and I were looking for exactly the same things: poems that were well-crafted of course, and with interesting things to say, but also poems that moved us emotionally. Poems that made us laugh or shiver with recognition, poems that awoke feelings of loss or beauty, poems that made us glad to be alive. Poems with SOUL, in other words. He and I both knew what we meant by that. So it’s not so surprising that when we presented each other with our shortlists, there was a high level of agreement between us.

All the three main prizewinners were featured in each of our shortlists of 20, and of the five runners-up, two were also on both our shortlists. This attests to the quality of these poems.

The runners-up are in alphabetical order: Elizabeth Gowing, Laura Helyer, Sue Hubbard, Colin Sutherill and Carol Anne Zlotowitz.

Third Prize goes to Judy Brown for MARBLES. We loved the wit and skill of this poem about the onset of middle age eyesight problems (and Adrian said he identified with it only too readily!!) with its delightful and deft use of imagery.

Second Prize goes to Candy Neubert for RESURRECTION. We found this poem intensely moving in its sensitive and almost elegiac treatment of the impending death of a mother, absorbing the reality of that loss through a walk with her in a garden, using a subtle blend of personal tenderness and universal identification through the processes of nature.

First Prize goes to John Goodby for THE UNCLES. This is a sublimely written poem, combining great technical skill (14 beats in each line, if I’m correct?) and an exhilarating, playful use of language, with warm funny affectionate observations on a breed of men almost disappeared from the world (though there are a few like them in my street, as it happens!). It’s a poem of celebration, respect, understanding, humour, loss of a way of life, and even a certain spirituality (’Uncles/ immortal in the welding shed’) It’s a tour de force, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you hear it.