A POET based in Newcastle was last night named as the winner of the £1,500 Wigtown Prize.
Anna Woodford, whose work was entitled Portrait of My Grandparents as Souvenirs, said: “My poem is concerned with my family history, specifically my grandfather’s experiences of having to flee wartime Poland to make a new life in Nottingham, and it is wonderful to have it recognised in this way.”
Publishing house Salt has already released two collections of Woodford’s poems – Changing Room in 2018 and Birdhouse in 2010.
The runner up was Jane Frank, from Brisbane in Australia, with Green Bathroom.
Frank lived in Dumfries and Galloway during the 1990s and is now director of the Centre for Creative Industries at Griffith University.
Last night’s online awards ceremony marked the culmination of the Wigtown Book Festival.
Entries for the competition – which covers poems written in English, Gaelic, or Scots – rose from 775 last year to 1,022 this year, and came from the UK, Germany, France, the United States, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latvia, Zambia, Hong Kong, Finland and Brazil.
The winner of the Scots prize was Robert Duncan, who lives in Newcastle, for A Drystane Dyke.
Duncan spent time as a teacher in Glasgow and as a writer with Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre.
The runner up was poet and playwright Wiliam Hershaw for Ainster Herbour, Hogmany.
The Gaelic prize went to Niall O’Gallagher for Penelope – who lives on Barra – and the runner up was Morag Ann MacNeil for Ann an Oisean Cùbhraidh Gàrraidh.
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