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Jude Nutter has won this year’s €10,000 Moth Poetry Prize for her work “Dead Drift”, it has been announced.
Nutter was named the winner at Poetry Ireland in Dublin last night (2nd May) in a competition run by The Moth magazine.
She was up against poems by American writer Margaret Haas, Canadian Steven Heighton and David Stavanger from Australia.
Nutter, who was born in Yorkshire and grew up in Hannover in Germany, has a family home in Dingle in Kerry, and divides her time between there and Minneapolis, where she has been working since 2000.
Her poetry has received over 40 awards and grants. First collection, Pictures of the Afterlife, was published by Salmon Poetry after she won The Listowel Prize in 2002. Her second collection, The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press), won the Ernest Sandeen Prize and was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. A third, I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman (University of Notre Dame Press), was awarded the 2010 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and voted Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Review in New York. Fourth collection, Dead Reckoning, will be published by Salmon Poetry next year.
Judge Jacob Polley said: “Studded with gorgeous words and phrases that serve with shrewd intensity the poem’s obligation to the weights and textures of the world, the poem is syntactically sinuous, so that line endings and verse breaks become perceptual; become, actually, a way to simultaneously organise what is known and excitingly disrupt how it’s made known.
“Like a time machine, this poem becomes the river it describes, which ‘opens everywhere/ and always and only into itself’ and in whose surface is apparent the present, the recent past and the deep past – is apparent the mystery of self and a relationship with a father, and the shelving off into deep time of human history. You can’t want much more as a reader from a poem.”