THREE TIMES QUEEN'S GRADUATE, NOW LECTURER, WINS PRESTIGIOUS FORWARD PRIZE FOR POETRY  

25 October 2019

Dr Stephen Sexton, BA English (2011), MA Creative Writing (2012), PhD (2017), who is a Lecturer in Queen's School of Arts, English and Languages, has won the prestigious Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

Stephen Sexton, who started teaching in Queen's Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in 2018, won the £5,000 Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection for If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin), in this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry.  

The work explores memories of his mother's death and the poet’s deep sense of loss through the lens of a beloved childhood video game Super Mario.

Commenting on the award, Stephen said: "It's a remarkable honour to have my work recognised in this way.

“This book was part of my Creative Writing PhD thesis which I completed at the Seamus Heaney Centre first under the supervision of our beloved Ciaran Carson and then Sinéad Morissey and Gail McConnell.

“I'm grateful for their guidance and expertise as well as the advice and friendship of many others at the Heaney Centre. I hope they too can share in this good news."

Born in 1988, Stephen spent a lot of time when he was nine years old playing Super Mario World.

Speaking to Times of India, Dr Sexton added: “I started this book as a kind of joke! The idea of writing poems, or little texts, or a whole book about Super Mario World seemed mildly absurd, and utterly compelling.

“I started writing it around the spring of 2015, and soon thereafter realised that this particular game was so much a part of my childhood that I couldn’t write about it without thinking of my childhood, and I couldn’t think about my childhood without thinking about grief.

“So, I discovered I was actually writing an elegy for my mother, which came as a surprise to me. In terms of genre, it’s a pastoral elegy, and the digital landscapes of Mario’s world are put beside the actual landscapes of our world.”

The Forward Prizes for Poetry are major British awards for poetry, presented annually each autumn at a public ceremony in London. The Prizes honour debut collections in the UK and Ireland, alongside the work of eminent names. The year's best new poetry is also presented at high profile live readings at the Southbank Centre.

Notable alumni include Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Claudia Rankine, Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, Carol Ann Duffy and Daljit Nagra.

This year’s Prizes were presented at a ceremony at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on 20 October. They were awarded live on stage by writer and broadcaster Shahidha Bari, who chaired the judging panel of poets Tara Bergin, Andrew McMillan and Carol Rumens alongside Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning at the British Library.

Founded in 1992 by William Sieghart the Forward Prizes for Poetry aim to celebrate excellence in poetry and increase its audience. The prizes identify and honour talent responsible for collections published in the UK and Ireland over the course of the previous year. Single poems nominated by journal editors or prize organisers are also eligible.

Each year, works shortlisted for the prizes — plus those highly commended by the judges — are collected in the Forward Book of Poetry.

Stephen was the winner of the 2016 National Poetry Competition. His pamphlet, Oils, (Emma Press), was the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet Choice and he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2018, for his collection The Animals, Moon.

To submit graduate news items, or for general enquiries about this story, please contact Gerry Power, Communications Officer, Development and Alumni Relations Office, Queen's University Belfast or telephone: +44 (0)28 9097 5321.

Photo credit: Michael Weir

Back to Main News

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

           

Top of Page