Holly Pester shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best Single Poem

We're thrilled to announce that Holly Pester’s poem ‘Comic Timing’ has been shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Holly Pester works as a practice-based researcher; she’s completed residences in the Text Art Archive, the Women’s Art Library and the Wellcome Collection. ‘Comic Timing’, her shortlisted poem, takes for its subject an early medical abortion, a ‘banal and farcical one’. ‘[A]che is tempo / I have seen millions of films / I get it’, she writes, as the rhythms of her retelling translate into the rhythms of the ‘bodily-yet-politicised experience’. Read Holly's remarkable poem here.   Writer and broadcaster Shahidha Bari will chair the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2019 judging panel. She is joined by poets Tara Bergin, Andrew McMillan, and Carol Rumens, alongside Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning at the British Library. Prizes will be awarded at the Southbank Centre on Sunday 20th October 2019. More information can be found here.