Also see our previous poetry contests, "Encountering" and "The Past".
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FIRST PRIZE WINNER £85
30-word bio: Shirani Rajapakse is a Sri Lankan poet and author. Her work is widely published in international magazines and anthologies.
Theophilus Kwek on "Uriah": I was brought up in a relatively conservative Christian family, and Bible stories (including that of David and Bathsheba) have been part of family devotions and Sunday School lessons since young. Arguably the most important character in this particular episode, however - the betrayed and eventually murdered husband of Bathsheba - has always come across as a shadow, without a prominent voice, or even a 'moral of the story', to his name. In the bigger picture, Uriah, ethnically Hittite and hence Gentile at birth, also exemplifies a rare but oft-untold perspective of Jewish cultural history: few events in the Israelite narrative, after all, hinge on an outsider such as he. I wrote this in an attempt to imagine the familiar anecdote through his eyes, and to flesh out the universal contrast between (his) loyalty and (her) betrayal as they must have played out in the court of Jerusalem.
30-word bio: Recently conscripted for mandatory National Service, Theophilus Kwek continues to write and dream about home and life beyond the barbed-wire fence.
THIRD PRIZE WINNER £35
"The Third is a Betrayal" by Sumana Roy
Sumana Roy on "The Third is a Betrayal": I find myself living in a culture infested by abundance. That abundance, unfortunately, is not surplus. When I came to T.S. Eliot’s ‘third’ in The Waste Land, I found myself thinking about that ‘third’ as adulterous. We use that word almost always for the ‘extra’ in marriages, the ‘extra-marital’ as it’s accusatively called. In trying to write about love in marriages, I found that the ‘extra’ became the ‘third’ in my poem. When I was younger, I liked to think that postmodernism had encouraged this life of thirdness. Now I feel I know better: all our relationships are betrayals for the third is not necessarily a ‘name-place-animal-thing’. We are our third. We are the third.
30-word bio: Sumana Roy lives in Siliguri, a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal, India.
HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED £15 each
30-word bio: Ian Chung graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme. He edits Eunoia Review, and reviews for Sabotage Reviews and The Cadaverine.
30-word bio: Amy Uyematsu is a poet from Los Angeles. She has three published collections, the most recent being Stone Bow Prayer.
30-word Bio: Heather Bell has published four books. Any more details can be found here.
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