Stephen gets major prize for his poem

Stephen gets major prize for his poem

12 April 2017

A BALLYGOWAN poet has won this year’s National Poetry Competition with his poem The Curfew.

Stephen Sexton (28) received the prestigious Poetry Society accolade this week and the £5000 prize at the Savile Club in Mayfair, London. 

The event was attended by Poet Laureate Carol-Ann Duffy and leading figures from the world of poetry.

Originally from Ballygowan, Stephen now lives in Belfast, where he is completing a doctorate at QUB.

His pamphlet Oils was published by The Emma Press to great acclaim in 2014, and was chosen as the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet Choice in the same year. 

He also follows in the footsteps of previous Northern Irish winners of the National Poetry Competition such as Medbh McGuckian in 1978, Colette Bryce in 2003 and Sinéad Morrissey in 2007.

Competition judge Judge Moniza Alvi described The Curfew as “a tour de force, dreamlike in its shifts, wide-ranging and deeply felt”.

Stephen said: “It’s an outrageous honour to have this poem recognised by the judges and perhaps the most exciting thing for me is the plain old fundamental feeling of being understood. Even if I’m not sure what is lingering behind the poem, there is pure joy in thinking that whatever is being transmitted arrived at its destination intact.”

“There’s a lot of history in the poem, but I think I thought more of a series of contexts and the interplay of interior and exterior spaces, each folded within another. I wanted, through an aggregation of these contexts – animals roaming around a town in the present, a mine collapse somewhere in the past – to create a kind of municipal pastoral scene in which what’s happening and what’s happened are overlaid and integrated.”

The Curfew can be read online at: poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/the-curfew/