DPF POETRY PRIZE 2023
DPF Prize for Poetry is a national poetry competition run by Derby Poetry Festival. The DPF Prize for Poetry is the new written poetry prize introduced to find spectacular poems.
Founded in 2017 and often referred to as DPF, Derby Poetry Festival has provided a platform for writers and poets in Derby and surrounding areas to share and experience work. We have prioritised developing new writers and bringing nationally and internationally significant talent to the city.
In 2023 we introduced more ways to support artists including this new Prize, for our inaugural year we had the wonderful Helen Mort as our judge.
Helen's collections Division Street (2013), No Map Could Show Them (2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022) are all published by Chatto & Windus. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The winners (First, Second, Third and a prize for a shortlisted writer from the East Midlands) received a cash prize. There were four cash prizes: £500 for first place, £250 for second place and £100 for third place as well as our East Midlands Entry where a longlisted poet from the East Midlands received £150.
The Derby Poetry Festival Poetry Prize 2023 competition was a massive success, with a whopping 151 submissions, it was difficult for our judge to pick our finalists and ultimately, our winners.
So, without further ado, it is our great pleasure to display the winners of the first Derby Poetry Festival Poetry Prize 2023...
Name: Amy King
Position: 1st Place
Poem Title: Devotion
Bio: Amy King is a slam winning poet based in Manchester. She ran the award winning spoken word night Verbose in 2021/2022, and is currently completing a Creative writing MA at the Manchester Metropolitan University. She enjoys writing about relationships, lesbian culture and her enduring love for Kate Nash.
According to Helen, “it was the ending of Devotion I kept going back to and finding it yielded a bit more each time.”
"Thank you to the Derby Poetry Festival team and Helen Mort for taking the time to read my poems and shortlisting them alongside such brilliant company! I'm a big fan of the festival and feel overjoyed to have won this prize."
Devotion
I asked her to be my girlfriend
the morning after she shouted
at a waiter in the street.
He served us a dodgy pie that day
to be fair. Something about honour.
No one laughed
when I told this story. I was the first
to buy her flowers. Lavender,
dried to last. She fixed us
sandwiches for the train,
swaddled in foil, right till the end.
It wasn’t all bad. We drank
with each other's friends.
Booked a hotel room and split
the cancellation fee. Once
she brought me cough syrup
on her drive home from the airport,
went down on me while I laid still
wheezing under the big light.
Now I linger before crossing
my road. Drink in other pubs,
one eye pinned to the door.
You know what it’s like
forgetting how easily they flipped
you over. The clink of a belt buckle.
One time she took my clothes
when the washer broke,
brought them back
smelling of lavender. Folded.
Name: Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Position: 2nd Place
Poem Title: Sunflowers
Bio: Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a photojournalist and a poet. Her first poetry collection was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Anastasia has been photographing the war in Ukraine since it started in 2014 and reporting poems since the Russian invasion. Sunflowers was written in autumn 2022.
Socials: Instagram and Twitter handles are @anastasiatl
One Language, published by Smith|Doorstop, March 2022.
https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/one-language/
"One Language, is a remarkable debut collection. From the perspective of a female photojournalist, these concise but complex and insightful poems draw on first-hand experience of war to explore how damage is generated and perpetuated."
Photo Credit: Paolo Verzone
Name: Ken Evans
Position: 3rd Place
Poem Title: A Lament for ‘My Dear’
Bio: ‘To An Occupier Burning Holes’, Ken’s latest collection, is published by Salt. He contributed to Broken Sleep’s ‘Masculinity’ anthology (Jan. 2024) as well as Live Canon’s round-up anthology for 2023 and was one of two runners-up in last year’s AUB poetry competition.
Individual poems feature in Poetry Scotland, Magma, Under the Radar, 14, The High Window, The Interpreter’s House. He won the Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition (2018). Ken reviews for The Manchester Review and The High Window.
Ken has lived for 30 years near Matlock in Derbyshire and finished an MA in poetry in 2015 at the University of Manchester.
Ken says that “A Lament for ‘My Dear' is a poem of loss, commemoration and celebration of the dying, analogue art of letter-writing.”
Name: Alice Tanik
East Midlands Prize
Poem Title: A Year in Ireland
Bio: Alison/Alice Tanik, is a midlands-based poet and playwright who performs under the stage name, 'Who the Fuck is Alice'. They are currently studying an MA in poetry at the Manchester Writing School. Their writing is often concerned with gender/political power and power (im)balance. They were an Associate Poet of the Derby Poetry Festival in 2023.
"I'm absolutely thrilled that my poem 'A Year in Ireland' has won the East Midlands prize in the inaugural Derby Poetry Festival Competition; being recognised within my region is really important. Thank you for having faith in my writing. In spite of the fact that I did, indeed, spend a year in a remote farmhouse in Ireland, this is only the second poem that I have ever written about that time. I wrote 'A Year in Ireland' in an attempt to find a 'container' for some of my unsettled/unsettling memories of that year."
Huge congratulations to all of our winners, and a massive thank you to everyone who was brave enough to submit their poetry for consideration.
We'll be running the second edition of the competition late 2024, so make sure you keep an eye out for announcements on our socials and this website.