Fiona Benson Wins 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection

The Guardian's Emily Hay reports that this year's Forward Prize has been awarded to Fiona Benson for Vertigo & Ghost, her second collection of verse. The annual prize is awarded to a poet for a single volume of poetry and comes with an honorarium of £10,000. More about Vertigo & Ghost:

Described as a collection that brings the violence of Greek myths into the #MeToo era, Vertigo & Ghost explores female fear, desire and ferocity, while rebranding the god Zeus as a serial rapist. Throughout the collection, Benson draws clear parallels between the events of Greek mythology and our own contemporary political moment: “I kept the dictaphone running / it recorded nothing / but my own voice / vulcanised and screaming / you won’t get away with this.”

Shahidha Bari, the chair of the judges, called it “a work of unfaltering determination and self-inspection. It is an exhilarating collection that pulses with fury, fear and defiance – and enduring hope too.”

Benson, who spent a decade crafting her debut collection Bright Travellers, said in an interview with the Forward Arts Foundation that the poems of Vertigo & Ghost “came in what felt like an involuntary rush, and sometimes in the case of the Zeus poems, I felt I didn’t want them, or couldn’t keep up … There was no plan.”

Continue on at The Guardian. Also taking home prizes this year are Stephen Sexton for Best First Collection and Parwana Fayyaz for Best Single Poem. Read more about the winning poets at the Forward Arts Foundation.