Jay Bernard has won the Ted Hughes award for new poetry with the performance Surge: Side A, a multimedia sequence which explores the 1981 New Cross fire. The £5,000 prize is given to the poet “who has made the most exciting contribution to poetry”, putting published collections alongside live performance, installations and radio pieces. Bernard, who uses the pronoun “they”, examined a tragedy which came to be a defining moment in black British history after 13 young people died at a birthday party in south London. “What Jay has done is to relate the story of the New Cross fire from their own perspective,” Beamish said. “In an amazing way, they’ve made a parallel between that struggle for validation in the black British community and their own redefining of their gender through surgery.

Source: The Guardian March 28, 2018 19:07 UTC