Vital Synz

Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition 2008

Competition Winners 2008

At an award ceremony held at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 17th, five worthy prize winners were presented with cheques and copies of Edwin Morgan's A Book of Lives (Carcanet) by Professor Michael Schmidt. The winners of this year's competition are:

1st Prize (£5000): Kate Miller - After the Ban. Kate was born in Plymouth and educated at King's College, Cambridge and Central St Martin's in Fine Art and Art History. In 2005 she received the Peters Fraser Dunlop bursary to study for her MA in Poetry at Royal Holloway College and is now a doctoral student at Goldsmiths.Recent poems appear in Bedford Square 2 (John Murray, 2007), London Magazine, The Shop and Poetry Wales.

2nd Prize (£1000): Wayne Price - Vacanti's Mouse. Wayne was born in south Wales and now lives in Aberdeen. He has published short stories and poetry in a number of anthologies and literary journals in the UK, Ireland and America. In recent years he has been a prize- winner in both the Bridport International Short Story and Bridport International Poetry Competitions. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Aberdeen.

3rd Prize (£500): Arthur Leung - What the Pig Mama Says. Arthur Leung was born and raised in Hong Kong, and received degrees from the Universities of Hong Kong and Cambridge. He is a regular performer of his poetry and has poems published in anthologies such as Fifty-Fifty and Hong Kong U Writing, as well as in numerous magazines and journals including Pulsar Poetry Magazine, Crannog Literary Magazine, Smartish Pace and Loch Raven Review. He was a Finalist for the 2007 Erskine J. Poetry Prize and short-listed for the 2007 Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse.

Runners-up (£50 each): Vicki Husband - gobby. Vicki was born and brought up in Edinburgh, and is now currently settled in Glasgow. She took an Honours Degree in fine art but now works in the NHS. She has had poetry published in the National Museums of Scotland anthology - Present Poets - and last year won 3rd prize in the 'Mslexia magazine' poetry competition. She has a place on the Masters course in creative writing at Glasgow University to start in the autumn.

Eddie Gibbons - Henri Rousseau meets Frank O'Hara: Eddie was born in Liverpool, and has lived and worked as a draughtsman in Aberdeen since 1981. His three collections to date, 'Stations of the Heart', 'The Republic of Ted' and 'Game On!' were published by Thirsty Books, Edinburgh. His latest collection, 'What They Say About You',will be published by Leamington Books, Edinburgh, later this year.

Competition Winners 2008

2008 Competition Winners: (l-r) Vicki Husband, Eddie Gibbons, Wayne Price, Kate Miller, Arthur Leung

Vital Synz would like to congratulate all the prize winners on their success and for the fine poems they have written. This year there were over 1000 entries to the competition and we hope that it will grow further in future years. Edwin Morgan

The competition is named in honour of Edwin Morgan, Scotland's first national poet: The Scots Makar. Widely recognised as one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century, Morgan's Collected Poems were published by Carcanet in 1990 and his Collected Translations in 1996, also by Carcanet. Since then, however, he has been as prolific as ever, publishing some thirteen books of further poems, translations and plays, most recently Tales from Baron Munchausen (Mariscat Press, 2004) and The Play of Gilgamesh (Carcanet, 2005). Among the many honours and awards Edwin Morgan has received are an OBE in 1982, the Soros Translation Award (1985), The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (2000), the Weidenfeld Translation Prize (2001) and the Jackie Forster Memorial Award for Culture (2003). His excellent website may be visited at www.EdwinMorgan.com

Each of our judges is among the country's most distinctive voices in poetry:

Colette Bryce Colette Bryce was born in Derry in 1970. In 1995 she won an Eric Gregory award and subsequently published her first collection, The Heel of Bernadette with Picador in 2000. This won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize for Best First Collection. Her second, The Full Indian Rope Trick was published by Picador in 2004.

Donny O Rourke Donny O'Rourke was born in Port Glasgow in 1959 and has had overlapping careers as a poet, television producer, broadcaster, journalist, academic and songwriter. He has been the recipient of many awards, fellowships and prizes including, most recently the Hermann Kesten Stipendium and a Major Scottish Arts Council Writers' Bursary. His collections include The Waistband and other poems (Polygon, 1996) and From Poetry's Waiting Room (Spatlese Verlag Nurnberg, 2005).

Richard Price is the author of Lucky Day (Carcanet, 2005) which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and Greenfields (Carcanet, 2007). His collection of short stories, A Boy in Summer, was published by 11:9 in 2002. Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library in London, he has also been an influential editor of many small literary magazines including Gairfish, Southfields, Verse and PS.