Tim Turnbull Wins Big

Tim Turnbull has won 'The Contenders', a £10,000 Performance Poetry Fellowship, awarded by the Arts Foundation.

Turnbull, born in North Yorkshire in 1960, recently published his first full length collection ofpoetry - Stranded in Sub-Atomica - with Donut Press (in the review pile of this humble editor).

Readers of this august blog will recall that I singled his work out in my review of the Hallam anthology, last summer. It's good to see a poet who fuses the page and stage get this sort of recognition.

In December he performed with fellow Contenders Shortlistees at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. On Thursday 26th January, at Pentagram in London's Notting Hill, he discovered it had won him the £10,000 prize.

The Contenders judges were Ian McMillan, poet and presenter of BBC Radio 3's The Verb; Ruth Borthwick, Head of Literature and Talks at London's South Bank Centre; and poet, Philip Wells. Other shortlisted poets were Zena Edwards, KatFrancois, Matt Harvey and Shamshad Khan.

A side-note: I included the work of Francois in my Short Fuse anthology several years ago, and am glad to see her continuing to do so well.

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