Jay Bernard | |
---|---|
Born | 1988 (age 35–36) London, U.K. |
Alma mater | Oxford University |
Occupation(s) | Writer, artist, film programmer, and activist |
Notable work | Surge (2019) |
Jay Bernard (born 1988), FRSL, is a British writer, artist, film programmer, and activist from London, UK. Bernard has been a programmer at BFI Flare since 2014, [1] co-editor of Oxford Poetry , [2] and their fiction, non-fiction, and art has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers.
Bernard was named a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005. [3] Bernard was selected for The Complete Works programme in 2014.
Bernard's pamphlet The Red and Yellow Nothing was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2016. The collection tells of the story of Sir Morien, a black knight at Camelot. [4] The reviewer for The London Magazine wrote: "Jay Bernard has created a rare and beautiful thing. Part contemporary verse drama, part mythic retelling....Employing metrical ballads and concrete poems with equal vigour, Bernard takes us on a visual and allusive journey to test the imagination, thus putting the poet’s resources of sight and sound to full use. ...reading The Red and Yellow Nothing brings continuous surprise." [5]
Bernard won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their multimedia performance work Surge: Side A, [6] that includes the film Something Said, inspired by the 1981 New Cross house fire [7] [8] [9] and archives held at the George Padmore Institute, where they were the first poet-in-residence. [10] The 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, and Twilight City, a film produced by Reece Auguiste for the Black Audio Film Collective in 1989, also provided inspiration for the work. [11]
Bernard was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. [12] [13]
Bernard's poetry collection, Surge, published by Chatto & Windus, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2019, [14] for the 2019 Costa Book Award (for Poetry), [15] for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize, [16] and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje Prize. [17] It won the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. [18]
Graphic art and poetry by Bernard appears in the following collections:
Bernard grew up in London, [11] and read English at Oxford University. [29] Bernard identifies as "black, queer", and uses the pronouns "they/ them". [11] Their Jamaican-born grandmother, Gee Bernard (1934–2016), was the first black councillor in Croydon and the first black member of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). [30] [31] [32]
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
The New Cross house fire was a fire that occurred during a party at a house in New Cross, south-east London, in the early hours of Sunday, 18 January 1981. The blaze killed 13 young black people aged between 14 and 22, and one survivor killed himself two years later.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book. In 2023 he won the David Cohen Prize.
Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.
Colette Bryce is a poet, freelance writer, and editor. She was a Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee from 2003 to 2005, and a North East Literary Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 2005 to 2007. She was the Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 2009 to 2013. In 2019 Bryce succeeded Eavan Boland as editor of Poetry Ireland Review.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Salena Godden is an English poet, author, activist, broadcaster, memoirist and essayist. Born in Hastings, UK, of Jamaican-Irish heritage, Godden based in London. Widely anthologised, she has published several books. She has also written for BBC TV and radio and has released four studio albums to date.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Caroline Bird is a British poet, playwright and author.
David Morley is a British poet, professor, and ecologist. His best-selling textbook The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing has been translated into many languages. His major poetry collections include FURY, Scientific Papers, The Invisible Kings, Enchantment, The Gypsy and the Poet, and The Magic of What's There are published by Carcanet Press. The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems was published by Carcanet and won The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. He was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by The Society of Authors for his body of work and contribution to poetry. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. FURY published in August 2020 was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection.
John Glenday grew up in Monifieth.
Kae Tempest is an English spoken word performer, poet, recording artist, novelist and playwright.
The Ted Hughes Award was an annual literary prize given to a living UK poet for new work in poetry. It was awarded each spring in recognition of a work from the previous year. It was a project which ran alongside Carol Ann Duffy's tenure as Poet Laureate, which ended when Duffy finished her 10 years as Poet Laureate in 2019
Katharine Towers is a British poet. She has published one poetry pamphlet and three poetry collections. Towers is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, The Floating Man, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for her second collection, The Remedies'.
Raymond Antrobus is a British poet, educator and writer, who has been performing poetry since 2007. In March 2019, he won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry. In May 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for his collection The Perseverance, praised by chair of the judges as "an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other." Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.
Lola Olufemi is a British writer. She is an organiser with the London Feminist Library, and her writing has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, and the co-editor of A FLY Girl's Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism.
Kayo Chingonyi FRSL is a Zambian-British poet and editor who is the author of two poetry collections, Kumukanda and A Blood Condition. He has also published two pamphlets, Some Bright Elegance and The Colour of James Brown’s Scream. He is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode. Chingonyi has won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright. His writing has appeared in publications and outlets including The New York Times, Poetry Review, Rialto, Poetry London, Triquarterly Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Wasafiri.