Carcanet are delighted to announce a double win at the Forward Prize ceremony which was hosted last night at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall in London. Vahni Capildeo's Measures of Expatriation won Best Collection (£15,000) and Sasha Dugdale's poem 'Joy', published in PN Review issue 227, won Best Single Poem (£1,000).

The Forward Prizes celebrate the best new poetry published in the British Isles, with previous winners including well-known contemporary poets such as Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Kathleen Jamie. Tiphanie Yanique's Wife (Peepal Tree Press) also won for Best First Collection (£5,000).

Measures of Expatriation is Capildeo’s fourth collection. Born in Trinidad, Capildeo has lived in the UK since 1991, winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where she studied Old Norse before working as an etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary. She speaks numerous languages, including Spanish, French, English.

Malika Booker, chair of the five-strong jury - also comprising poets George Szirtes and Liz Berry, with singer/songwriter Tracey Thorn and Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine - said: 'Vahni Capildeo’s Measure of Expatriation is a work that amazes. We found a vertiginous excitement in the way in which the book grasps its subject: the sense of never quite being at home. This is poetry that transforms. When people in the future seek to know what it’s like to live between places, traditions, habits and cultures, they will read this. Here is the language for what expatriation feels like.'

Booker also described Dugdale's 'Joy', a poem which presents the death of Wiliam Blake as retold by Catherine, his widow, as 'addictive writing, compelling and tender.'

Congratulations Vahni and Sasha!