The Rathbones Folio Prize 2019 Awards Ceremony
Posted 22nd May 2019
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On Monday evening, poet Raymond Antrobus was announced as the winner of this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize.
The ceremony took place in the Entrance Hall of the British Library. It was the culmination of several months of discussion and well over a month of concentrated publicity; the shortlist had been announced early in April; the judges announced last November.
Beginning with live music and time for drinks and conversation, there ceremony was then officially opened. We were welcomed by Rathbones (sponsor) and Andrew Kidd (co-founder of the prize). The shortlisted authors who attended were brought onto the stage for photographs and flowers. The Chair of the judges, Kate Clanchy, then took over to tell us about the judging process, the three judges’ general opinions of the books, and to announce the winner. Alice Jolly, she said, had been a close second.
Raymond Antrobus gains £30,000 for his poetry collection, The Perseverance. Clanchy had introduced him as winner saying it was “an exceptionally brave, kind book – it seemed, in our atomised times, to be the book we most wanted to give to others, the book we all needed to read”. In a show of wonderful humility, Antrobus thanked everyone and noted the poets he spotted in the audience, spending time introducing them. He then read a poem from his collection.
Antrobus is a Jamaican British deaf poet. Born 33 years ago in Hackney, East London, he was considered dyslexic and severely learning disabled, his deafness not discovered until the age of 6. He performs his poetry often and was one of the first recipients of an M.A. in Spoken Word Education (from Goldsmiths, London).
The Perseverance, published by small press, Penned in the Margins, in October, explores issues such as his diagnosis, his mixed heritage experience, masculinity, and his beloved father’s alcoholism and later decline into dementia and death. For it, the poet has received the Ted Hughes Award, having included a redacted poem Hughes wrote about deaf children (‘Deaf School’), and writing a response to it; Hughes’ poem showed to Antrobus a lack of understanding.
The Guardian says the book ‘confronts deeply rooted prejudice against deaf people’. In an interview with literary magazine, Four Hubs, Antrobus said: “This book is me trying to find a use for all the things in my life that felt like a disadvantage, a nuisance, the things I once tried to hide”.
Have you read or do you plan to read any of the books that were shortlisted?
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