We're thrilled to announce that three Carcanet titles have been longlisted for the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize!

Thinking with Trees by Jason Allen-Paisant, Imperium by Jay Gao and Some Integrity by Padraig Regan all made the longlist for the biennial prize, which is awarded to a distinctive first collection of poetry published between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2022.

The prize was established in honour of Liverpool-born poet Michael Murphy, who sadly passed away in 2009. Michael was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for 'New Poet of the Year' in 2001, so this prize aims to extend the same recognition to another new poet.

The shortlist for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize will be announced on the 8th September 2019, and the winner will be announced on National Poetry Day on 5th October.

Congratulations to Jason, Jay and Padraig!

Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in a village in central Jamaica. 'Trees were all around,' he writes, 'we often went to the yam ground, my grandmother's cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. [...] The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.'

Now he lives in Leeds, near a forest where he goes walking. 'Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture...' And even as they help him recover his connections with nature, the poems in Thinking with Trees are inevitably political.

 

By reimagining episodes from Homer's Odyssey, Jay Gao's highly anticipated debut collection, Imperium, introduces an innovative talent whose work cuts across poetic traditions, traversing mythic cartographies and imperial formations. Exploring forms of absolute and intimate power, Imperium is an imaginative meditation on how the past lives on in the present by way of, and beyond, a global poetics of diaspora.

 

The poems of Some Integrity by Padraig Regan bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.