The Disabled Poets Prize, which looks to find the best work created by UK-based deaf and disabled poets, announced its 2024 winners on Saturday 16th March at an event broadcast as part of the Deptford Literature Festival programme.
Deaf and disabled poets face significant barriers to developing their careers. The Disabled Poets Prize brings the work of the winning writers to new prominence, focusing attention on the exceptional work being produced by deaf and disabled writers. It is the first poetry prize in the UK specifically for deaf and disabled poets.
The Disabled Poets Prize was founded in 2023 by Jamie Hale in collaboration with Spread the Word, Verve Poetry Press, and CRIPtic Arts. The 2024 Prize is funded by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and supported by The Literary Consultancy and Arvon Foundation.
For each award, the prize for first place is £500, second place wins £250, and third place wins £100. The highly commended entries will each be awarded £50. The Disabled Poets Prize also offers significant professional development opportunities for the winning writers, including a publication deal with Verve Poetry Press for the best unpublished pamphlet, as well as development prizes from The Literary Consultancy and Arvon Foundation.
The 2024 Disabled Poets Prize was judged by Pascale Petit, Stephen Lightbown, Kabir Kapoor – the British Deaf Association’s UK BSL Poet Laureate – and Jamie Hale.
Disabled Poets Prize 2024 winners
The Disabled Poets Prize consists of two awards, each having first, second and third prizes. The judges also share their other recommendations for high-quality poem entries.
Best Unpublished Pamphlet 2024
The Best Unpublished Pamphlet prize was awarded to Susie Wilson for Nowhere Near As Safe As A Snake In Bed.
Susie Wilson is an autistic Scottish poet, with ADHD and Stage 4 Melanoma, living in Sheffield. She holds an MA in Poetry from The Writing School, MMU and has been published widely in anthologies such as those for the Winchester, Gloucester and Shepton Mallet Competitions, with poems also commended by Fresher and Poets & Players and longlisted in The Rialto Nature Competition.
You can also read her work in journals such as Envoi, Monofiction and Black Bough. Frosted Fire Firsts and Indigo Dreams longlisted her first pamphlet Skin The Rabbit in 2020, which has yet to find a home.
Susie Wilson said: “Thank you so much to Pascale Petit and Jamie Hale for selecting my sequence of melanoma poems to win the unpublished pamphlet prize. It is fantastic to know that they will get their day in the sun. Living as I do with Stage 4 melanoma, ‘getting published’ was my single bucket item and I’m delighted that I’m gonna need a bigger bucket.”
She added: “As an auDHD poet, it’s brilliant to be able to represent the complexity of what we are capable of (in my case perhaps often left-field/surreal image links and sound/language patterning characteristic of my auDHD) whilst at the same time having the helping hand which this prize brings to get to market and develop further.
“The Disabled Poet Prize last year made me realise that it’s no good waiting to feel better, or be ok, or get on top of things. It made me see that it’s possible to get on with writing with hope and verve. I hope to see what we can do to keep spreading the word about this brilliant prize over the next year.
Second place goes to Anna Starkey for All These Frequencies, and third place to Amber Horne for So She Spoke.
Exit Amours by Ozge Gozturk, Learning in Nine Keys by Norman Miller and Scar Tissue by Danne Jobin were all highly commended by the judges.
Best Single Poem 2024
The award for Best Single Poem 2024 went to Gayathiri Kamalakanthan for Eating An Orange.
Gayathiri Kamalakanthan (they/them) is a disabled Tamil poet and support worker. They’re a winner of the Faber & Andlyn Publisher’s Prize and the MONO poetry prize. Gayathiri is published in bath magg, fourteen poems, Propel and Magma; they’ve performed with DAYTIMERS, Apples and Snakes and Roundhouse. Gayathiri also runs the poetry workshop WORD-BENDERS at The Common Press bookshop.
Gayathiri Kamalakanthan said: “It’s meaningful that this Prize exists – it makes me feel like I’m a writer, even when writing is painful and slow. I can’t type for very long so I often record myself speaking bits and pieces that could become poems. This poem thinks about the admin and scheduling of grief, which for me mirrors some of the admin and scheduling around long-term physical pain.”
In second place was Rachel Burns and her poem Blue Monday. Third place went to Alex Mepham for Dark Matter.
Could this be how to love by Elizabeth Gibson, Ward 9 by Vera Yuen, and A Horse Walks into a Bar – After Tyrone Lewis by Dee Dickens were all highly commended by the judges.
Best Poem Performed in BSL
As well as the two main prizes, Sahera Khan’s poem My Eyes was highly commended by the judges in the category Best Poem Performed in BSL.
Sahera will receive £300 as well as a one-to-one with an editor at The Literary Consultancy and a free membership to their Being a Writer community platform. She also receives an online masterclass by Arvon and an online professional development session with CRIPtic Arts and Spread the Word.
Sahera Khan is a Muslim, British South Asian, Deaf and British Sign Language Artist/Actor. She is also a poet, who has been widely published and performed across the UK and in Rotterdam. She started writing to share her many creative stories with others.
In 2010 she enrolled in several creative writing courses, then created her first blog for short pieces, before combining these into a book Sahera: Short Poetry & Stories, which she self-published via Kindle. She had written nine ebooks. These covered a range of topics like children’s stories, fiction and non-fiction.
She has also written several short screenplays for screen and theatre scripts, including a short film called He Stood Me Up, which was commissioned by BSL Zone.
Sahera Khan said: “That is amazing news. I honour my BSL poem My Eyes [being] selected for special commendation. I feel this poem is important to me in expressing my deafness to the world [and] to understand how I grew up. I look forward to working with CRIPtic Arts and Spread the Word to develop my poem My Eyes and perform.”
The 2025 Disabled Poets Prize, sponsored by ALCS, will open for entries later this year.
You can re-watch the Disabled Poets Prize ceremony online.
Head to the Disabled Poets Prize website to find out more about the awards and when 2025 entries will be open. You can also follow on Twitter @DisabledPoets and Instagram @disabledpoets.