Fossil fish poems land major prize for North East poet
Katrina Porteous hailed in UK City of Culture
It has been a good few days for Northumberland poet Katrina Porteous whose fourth collection, Rhizodont, has won this year’s Laurel Prize.
The prize, run by Poetry School, the national poetry education charity, was established by Simon Armitage when he was appointed Poet Laureate in 2019.
He donates his annual Poet Laureate’s ‘honorarium’ of £5,000 as the first prize in the competition dedicated to poetry about nature and the environment, subjects he cares deeply about.
This year’s Laurel Prize judges were poets Kathleen Jamie and Daljit Nagra along with Caroline Lucas, former leader and co-leader of the Green Party.
Chair Kathleen Jamie said: “Katrina Porteous has always kept faith with the North East, where times of transition are intensely played out in the post-industrial landscapes.
“She refuses to ignore local language either, offering work adept in Northumbrian dialect, modern English and the argot of science.
“Rhizodont considers deep time, extractive industry, alienation and the efforts of communities to survive with integrity, and, in a crucial act of imagination, she speaks as other non-human entities, an ice-core, a redshank.
“We were impressed by the way her attention to the small and local belied the sweep and depth of her project. Rhizodont displays modern lyricism by a senior poet, loving, knowing and authoritative.”
The collection, published last year by Hexham-based Bloodaxe Books, takes its name from a three-metre-long fossil fish found on Cocklawburn beach, just south of Berwick, in 2007.
The poetry sequence moves from familiar places along the North East coast to embrace global questions of evolution, survival and extinction – in the natural world but also in communities and languages.
Katrina was announced as the winner in Bradford, this year’s UK City of Culture. Four other finalists each receive £1,000.
You can hear her on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb on Sunday, October 5 (5.10pm) when she will talk about the ‘Under the Ice’ sequence from Rhizodont. It’s a recording of an interview she gave in Bradford in front of an audience.
On the programme you will hear her reading from the sequence accompanied by electronic music by Peter Zinovief.
Meanwhile, you might have heard Katrina on BBC Radio 4 recently in the documentary How Trains Shrank Time and Space, reflecting poetically on the Stockton & Darlington Railway where the first passengers experienced rail travel 200 years ago.
If you missed it, you can catch the programme on BBC Sounds.