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Venture Award 2013 Now Open for Entries!
Posted: 18 June 2012
The Venture Award invites entries for its 2013 prize, judged by Nathalie Handal. Launched in 2011, the Venture Award for poetry pamphlets offers £1750 in prize money, plus publication. The inaugural prize was won by Rowyda Amin, whose pamphlet will be released later this year. The deadline this year is September 30, 2012.
- New award for poetry pamphlets
- 15 pages of poetry to enter
- £1000 prize plus publication for winner
- Up to six additional runner-up awards
flipped eye publishing, an award-winning small press, helped launch the Venture Award - named in memory of Wilfred Alfred Venture, a descendant of composer, actor and writer Ignatius Sancho, and influential mentor in his lifetime - to seek the next generation of great poets based on submissions of 15 pages of poetry.
In keeping with flipped eye publishing's international and varied output, an advisory board, based in North America and the UK, of poets, critics and editors with a keen ear for true innovation, talent and creativity in poetry, has been assembled. It comprises; Dr Nathalie Teitler, a Latin American poetry scholar; Fred D'Aguiar, anaward-winning poet and lecturer; Dr Lauri Ramey, a poetry critic, author and scholar; Jeremy Poynting, founder and editor of Peepal Tree Press; and Christian Campbell, a poet, scholar and recent winner of the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. The advisory board traditionally aid the judge in the selection of the winner of the award.
Last year's winner, Rowyda Amin, was excited at the chance to work with flipped eye publishing, acknowledged innovators in the publishing of poetry pamphlets: "I've literally been dancing with joy the past two days, I'm that pleased. flipped eye has a roster of brilliant poets, so having a pamphlet of mine join such company will be a real honour." Sarah B. Westcott, runner up, agreed: "I was surprised and delighted to be in the top two of the Venture Award as it was a really strong and varied shortlistand it's such a prestigious and exciting prize. It feels like a wonderful leap forward for me. I'm really looking forward to working with the flipped eye team!"
For more information, please see the flipped eye website.
Judge's Biography
Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor who has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her poetry collections include The Lives of Rain, shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Menada Literary Award; and Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award 2011, which won an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival and is described by The New York Times as "a book that trembles with belonging (and longing)." Alice Walker lauds Handal's work as "poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve."
A Lannan Foundation Fellow, a Fundación Araguaney Fellow, and recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, Nathalie's work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, such as The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Wales, Ploughshares, Poetry New Zealand, Crab Orchard Review, and The Literary Review; and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has also promoted international literature through translation, research, and the editing of the groundbreaking The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets bestseller and winner of the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award.
Nathalie Handal received an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College, a Master of Philosophy in Drama and English from the University of London, and has studied contemporary literature in Russia, France, and Spain. She is currently a professor at Columbia University and part of the Low-Residency MFA Faculty at Sierra Nevada College. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa describes her poetry as a"cosmopolitan voice [that] belongs to the human family." Nathalie writes the blogcolumn, The City and The Writer, for Words without Borders magazine.
Source: Venture Award
Categories: Poetry Prizes
