Welcome to Winchester Poetry Festival
Winchester Poetry Day will take place Saturday 5 October 2024.
Kathryn Bevis Prize
Celebrating the best poem entered into Winchester Poetry Prize competition, written by a poet based in Hampshire.
This year we launch our globally recognised Winchester Poetry Prize for the ninth year - renaming the ‘Hampshire Prize’ as the ‘Kathryn Bevis Prize’.
The Kathryn Bevis Prize will celebrate the best poem entered into the Winchester Poetry Prize competition, each year, by a poet based in Hampshire. It will be chosen anonymously by the Winchester Poetry Prize competition judge - this year the judge is Clare Shaw.
The winner of the Kathryn Bevis Prize will receive £150, will read their poem as part of a special prize-giving event at Winchester Poetry Day 2024, and will feature in a printed anthology made available on the day. Alongside this, The Writing School will offer the winner of the Kathryn Bevis Prize three one-day poetry workshops with leading poets, as well as a Digital Poetry Retreat of five days with Costa Prize Winner Jonathan Edwards.
This prize is designed to offer a year of development opportunities and coaching to help the winner of the Kathryn Bevis Prize to develop their poetic career, just as Kathryn has supported so many new writers to develop their own talent.
©Tina Norris Photography
Ewan Monaghan, The Writing School Online, says:
"Kathryn has been at the heart of the poetry community in Hampshire for years and has brought poetry to many new writers both in the classroom and in less traditional educational settings, such as her work with prisons. She has ceaselessly encouraged the creativity of others in Hampshire and Winchester has a huge colony of poets who are indebted to her. More than that though, Kathryn has risen to become one of the UK’s finest contemporary poets. Flamingo and The Butterfly House demonstrate her incredible skill, musicality and imagination through poems on animals, love, memory and family. Lately her work has also become an inspiration and consolation to those living with illness. Her poems dealing with her own cancer will become long-lived part of the English canon and are some of the most humane and beautiful reflections on mortality written in this century. For those reasons we are utterly delighted to support the renaming of the Hampshire Prize, to recognise Kathryn’s incredible body of work on and off the page."
Chair of Winchester Poetry Festival, Jane Bryant, says:
“Winchester Poetry Festival feels honoured to rename the Hampshire Prize, the Kathryn Bevis Prize. Kathryn is now a nationally recognised, award-winning poet who not only brings her success as a poet because of the quality and depth of her writing and the expressive insights that this gives, but she also brings a record of commitment to growing and developing poets and poetry writing and expression in others. A former Hampshire Poet, she has worked with many diverse communities including with those experiencing challenges in their lives, and with emerging poets, offering wisdom, expertise and most importantly recognising and growing their potential. We are really delighted to honour her work in this way”.
Kathryn Bevis is a poet and poetry teacher, former Hampshire Poet Laureate, and founder of The Writing School Online. She is the Selected Poet for Magma (the Solitude issue) and her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals, including: Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, Wasafiri, and Mslexia. They have also featured on BBC Radio 4.
In the last year, poems of hers have won the Wales Poetry Award, the inaugural Crysse Morrison Award, the Second Light Poetry Competition, and co-won both the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the Poetry Society Members’ Competition.
Kathryn designs and delivers poetry workshops for adults online and in mental health settings, substance-misuse recovery settings, and prisons, as well as teaching for Arvon.
Flamingo is her debut pamphlet, published by Seren, recently named as one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Books of the Year’ for 2022 and shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet, 2022. ‘My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written – 2023, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written – 2023.
Her debut collection, The Butterfly House is forthcoming (Seren, 2024).
The Writing School are here to help your creativity bloom. We employ the UK’s leading writers and illustrators to teach students who want develop their creative talent. All our teaching happens through short online taught courses, or for writers who would like more immersive tutoring, through five-day digital poetry retreats and one to one tuition. Many of our students have gone onto publication in leading journals and some even to full collections and books.
The Kathryn Bevis Prize is generously supported by:
Winchester Poetry Prize 2024 is open now (from 3rd April 2024).
