Trini poet wins Forward Prize

Her winning collection, Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet), was published in January.

“Vahni Capildeo strives to see the past present in the future,” said Don Share, a member of the judging panel and editor of the influential magazine Poetry, moments before Capildeo was announced as winner. Capildeo has published five books of poems and two pamphlets. She was the 2014 Judith E Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cambridge, and in the same year she served as a judge for the prestigious Forward Poetry Prizes. She was long listed for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for her collection Dark and Unaccustomed Words, one of a trilogy that she has described as an ars poetica.

Past Forward Prize winners include Claudia Rankine, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Alice Oswald, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Kei Miller. Poets short listed for best collection this year included Ian Duhig, Choman Hardi, Alice Oswald and Denise Riley. Not only was Capildeo announced as overall winner, but another Caribbean poet, Tiphanie Yanique — who was born in the US Virgin Islands — also took home the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for Wife (Peepal Tree Press).

The book also won the 2016 OCM Prize for Poetry and was short listed for the 2016 OCM Prize for Caribbean Literature. In 2014, Jamaican poet Kei Miller won the overall Forward Prize.

In a 2012 interview with editor and poet Nicholas Laughlin, Capildeo remarked, “I work very hard for the liberty of the imagination. I sometimes feel that any environment in which a Caribbean writer tries to speak now is a trapped environment. It’s full of landmines, either of nationalism or of identity politics.” The Forward Prizes are the most coveted awards for poetry published in Britain and Ireland.

They were set up in 1992 by philanthropist William Sieghart to celebrate excellence in poetry and increase its audience, and are awarded to published poets for work in print in the last year.