Keats-Shelley Prize 2018

Prize Winners

The winners of 2018’s Keats Shelley Prize were announced by this year’s Prize Chair Liz Lochhead at the annual Keats-Shelley Awards Ceremony held on 23rd May at the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House in central London. This year’s theme of ‘Liberty’ was chosen to mark the bicentenary of PB Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), the four-act lyrical drama, in which the heroic Prometheus strikes a blow for human freedom against the power of the gods.

The Awards Ceremony was was introduced by readings from the Young Romantics by actors Jonny Taylor and Polly Edsell, both of whom recently starred in ‘Rebel Angel’ by Angus Graham-Campbell, the critically acclaimed play about John Keats’ time as a medical student. Graham-Campbell compiled the readings, Fanfare to Liberty, from words by William Blake, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, John Keats and Dorothy Wordsworth and more.

2018’s Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics Prizes attracted a record number of entries from around the world. With winners from the USA, Ireland and England, this year’s theme of ‘liberty’ clearly inspired global creativity, especially in the Young Romantics 16-18 category where 2018 entries were up 50% over last year.

The panel of judges include the celebrated poets Matthew Sweeney and Jo Shapcott, and Professors Simon Bainbridge and Sharon Ruston. For further information about our Judges: click here.

For a full report on the Awards Ceremony, click here.

Read about 2018’s Young Romantics Prize here.

Poetry First Prize Winner

Laurinda Lind, Conscientious Objector

Poetry Second Prize Winner

Laurence O’Dwyer, Avenida Libertador

Essay Prize Winner

Tara Lee, Philosophic numbers smooth

Essay Second Prize Winner

Clare Jones, Bat, Bat, Come Under my Hat

Shortlists

Poets were asked to write on the theme of LIBERTY, to celebrate the bi-centenary of PB Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Essays may be on any aspect of the lives of the Romantics and their Circles.

In alphabetical order:

Poetry Shortlist

Theo Akiyama, John Salter, 7 Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Sharon Black, Fourteen Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Jane Boxall, Instamatic New England Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Mark Fiddes, Apache Versace Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Mark Fiddes, Self Portrait with Violator Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Jack Houston, Captain Barnacles Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Laurinda Lind, Conscientious Objector Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Laurence O’Dwyer, Avenida Libertador Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Pascale Petit, On Finding My First Ocellated Lizard Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Cheryl Pearson, I Dream Sometimes Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Victor Tapner, The Reforms of William Wilberforce Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Sarah Wimbush, Carroty Kate Read Poem

Theo Akiyama is a former joiner/woodworker and current PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Essay Shortlist

Adam Colman, 'Percy Shelley and Habits' Read Essay
Clare Jones, 'Bat, Bat, Come Under my Hat' Read Essay
Tara Lee, 'Philosophic numbers smooth' Read Essay

Longlists

Poetry Longlist

Essay Longlist

Judges

  • Chair of Judges

    Liz Lochhead

    An acclaimed poet, playwright and broadcaster, Liz Lochhead is regarded as one of Britain’s finest living writers. ‘Liz Lochhead has made a unique contribution to Scottish poetry,’ Carol Ann Duffy has written. ‘From the start, she spoke in her own feisty, female voice, mixing old Scots with new Scots – as aware of Burns as of Morgan – and she did this with a galvanizing spirit and vitality that helped to change the landscape of British poetry’.

    Between 2011 and 2016, Liz was the Makar, Scotland’s National Poet Laureate. It was her second such honour: in 2005, she was made Glasgow’s Poet Laureate. In 2015, Liz was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

    Born in Motherwell in 1947, she served her literary apprenticeship in Philip Hobsbaum’s writers’ group alongside James Kelman, Alasdair Grey, Jeff Torrington and Tom Leonard. The poems Lochhead wrote during this time would be collected in 1972’s Memo for Spring. Later collections include True Confessions and New Clichés (Polygon, 1985), Bagpipe Muzak (Penguin, 1991), The Colour of Black & White (Polygon, 2003) and A Choosing (Polygon, 2011). Her selected poems, A Choosing, were published in 2011.

    Her plays include: Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989); Dracula (1989); Cuba (1997), a play for young people commissioned by the Royal National Theatre; and Perfect Days (1998). She has also translated Molière’s Tartuffe (1985) and adapted The Misanthrope as Misery Guts (2002).

    Liz’s engagement with the Romantic period runs through her work. ‘I grew up being taught Burns and the border ballads – but then John Keats grew up on those ballads as well,’ she told the Guardian. As well as memorising Robert Burns’ ballads as a child, Liz also learned John Keats’ Old Meg She was a Gypsy by heart. She entitled her 1984 collection, Dreaming Frankenstein, which echoed the subject of her first play, Blood and Ice – a dramatic recasting of how Mary Shelley’s life intersected with her most famous work. You can hear Liz read a selection of Robert Burns at the BBC here.

  • Poetry Judges

    Mathew Sweeney

    The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association was deeply saddened by the death of Matthew Sweeney, the acclaimed Irish poet and since 1999 a Poetry Judge for the Keats-Shelley Prize. Read our own appreciation: here.

    Matthew was born in County Donegal. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books among others. His collections include: A Dream of Maps (1981), Blue Shoes (1989), Cacti (1992), The Bridal Suite (1997), A Smell of Fish (2000), Selected Poems (2002), Black Moon (2007), The Night Post: A New Selection (2010), and Inquisition Lane (Bloodaxe Books 2015). He is the winner of many poetry awards including the Cholmondley Award, the Arts Council Award and in 2014 the Piggott Poetry Prize. He has worked as Poet in Residence at the University of East Anglia and the South Bank and elsewhere.

  • Professor Jo Shapcott

    Professor Jo Shapcott, FRSL joined us as Poet Judge in 2017. She has won numerous awards including the National Poetry Competition (twice), the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (2011). She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

    Her books include Poems 1988-1998 (2000, reprinted 2006) consisting of poetry from her three earlier collections: Electroplating the Baby (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Phrase Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). Together with Matthew Sweeney, she edited Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (1996), an international anthology of contemporary poetry in English. Her book Tender Taxes, “her version of Rilke” was published in 2002. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award.

  • Essay Judges

    Professor Sharon Ruston

    Professor Sharon Ruston is a long-standing judge of essay prizes. She is Chair of Romanticism in the English Literature and Creative Writing department at the University of Lancaster.

    Her research specialism concerns the relations between the literature, science and medicine of the Romantic period, 1780-1820. She has published The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein (2021), Creating Romanticism (2013), Romanticism: An Introduction (2010), and Shelley and Vitality (2005). She co-edited The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy for Oxford University Press (2020) and led the AHRC-funded project to transcribe all of the Davy’s notebooks: wp.lancs.ac.uk/davynotebooks/

    Read a Q&A with Sharon and Professor Tim Fulford at the BARS Blog.

    Visit Sharon’s profile page at the University of Lancaster here.

  • Professor Simon Bainbridge

    Professor Simon Bainbridge is a long-standing judge of the essay prizes. He teaches and writes at the University of Lancaster.

    His main research interest is in the relationship between the writing of the Romantic period and its historical context. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Mountaineering and British Romanticism: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1770 – 1836 (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the editor of Romanticism: A Sourcebook. He has published in journals such as Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net and The Byron Journal and has written essays and entries for An Oxford Companion to The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, The Blackwell Companion to European Romanticism, and The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. He is a Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust and the Wordsworth Conference Foundation.

    Visit Simon’s profile page at the University of Lancaster here.