England's Green

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What’s more English than a place name like ‘Bascote Heath, Little Itchington’ where we meet Kunial “armed with my mother’s maiden name” picturing the humanity behind the names. There’s an echo of Larkin’s “long uneven lines” as Kunial imagines the glorious dead “moving in one long continuous / column, four abreast …” which would stretch from Whitehall to Durham. Immediately he imagines the column in the pre-partition India, where his father was born into a Muslim family. Later in the book we see a wartime photo of his English grandfather next to “one of two brown” fellow airmen. This is the same grandfather Constructing a Nervous System won the nonfiction category, while the fiction award was won by Michelle de Kretser for Scary Monsters. The poetry prize was taken by Victoria Adukwei Bulley for her debut collection Quiet. The first three poems of the collections are titled ‘Foxglove’, ‘Forget-Me-Not’, and ‘The Hedge’. This is England. We know where Kunial wants to be

Aliyah Begumis a nineteen-year-old poet and performer, who was Birmingham’s Young Poet Laureate between 2018-2020. She is a commended Foyle Young Poet and her work has been featured on Young Poets Network, in anthologies and on the radio. She has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, and is currently studying English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Zaffar Kunial's 'Us' (Faber & Faber, 2018) was shortlisted for a number of awards including the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. The collection falls into four parts. I think of them as music albums and the first one is loosely about insects, but it’s also about many other things that kind of bring in human elements. It’s also about the urgency of their very brief lives, but seen through quite a human lens… We all see through our human perspectives, so when I’m talking about the insects for example, the perspective is very much of a middle aged mum, so a lot of the insects that I’m most able to strongly empathise with, it’s in their maternal instincts that I find the most common ground.’ In 2022, the T. S. Eliot Prize (the most valuable prize for new poetry collections in the UK and Ireland) and Young Poets Network, The Poetry Society’s leading platform for poets aged up to 25, ran an exciting new collaboration to support the next generation of poetry reviewers: the Young Critics Scheme.I was really excited by Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha – how so much was painted in so few words and with so much left out. Young Critics Davina Bacon and SZ Shao shares their experiences of the programme, and what they have been up to since, in the new videos below. You might also find the two features published on Young Poets Network as part of the 2022 Scheme helpful: How To Write A Poetry Review and 15 Top Tips From Leading Critics.

That’s the same middle where the West Indian Viv Richards can place his “feet exactly where [WG] Grace / played at fifty” (‘Innings’)Not sure really, and I wasn’t a bookish child, but the first proper novel I read, when I was nineteen, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, made me feel it might be possible to have the thrill of self-recognition in books and gave me an image of a writer I could see a bit of myself in. Although this poem describes events in 1616 and 1066, the closing line: “Shapes. Spreading from the future on the beach.” speaks as much of those who come to Britain today for safety and shelter as it does of conquest or invasive species. SZ Shaois a British Asian creative based in London. Their written work revolves around gender, power and connectivity with the more-than-human. SZ has been commended in several Young Poets Network challenges, won third prize in the 2022 Talking Glass challenge, and second prize in the 2021 poetry translation challenge. Noah Jacobis an Arab-British poet and performer. She is an editor and columnist for Zindabad Zine and alum of The Writing Room and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, having placed second in the Roundhouse Poetry Slam 2021. She has been featured in SLAMbassadors, Kalopsia Lit, Shubbak Festival and Camden Festival.