Poet Kei Miller wins prestigious prize

'The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way To Zion' took the £10,000 prize, with judges relishing Miller’s ability to “defy expectations” and “set up oppositions only to undermine them”.

Miller, 35, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and financed his studies at Manchester Metropolitan University was announced the winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry, 'The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way to Zion'

The chair of the judges, the historian and broadcaster Jeremy Paxman, said:

Kei is doing something you don’t come across often: this is a beautifully voiced collection which struck us all with its boldness and wit. Many poets refer to multiple realities, different way.”

Miller who teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, has been quietly gaining a reputation for his work both here and in the Caribbean.

Let’s hope this win helps in come to the attention of the Barbican and other art centres so that we can have more art from a Black perspective, illuminating and positive. A far cry from the crude, powerless, humiliating imagery served up by the self proclaimed controversialist Brett Bailey.

Simon Woolley

If this short poem stretches beyond

its first line, then already, already,

it has failed, become something else,

something its author did not intend

for it to become, a misbehaving,

rambunctious, own-way thing,

its circuitous journey a secret known

only to itself, its tongue its own.

The author is destined, I am afraid,

to write poems that escape him.

This, for instance, was to be just one

line long, or even one long line,

dedicated to Mervyn Morris and his love

of brevity, but it has become something else

entirely. The poem sings its own song,

reaches its own end in its own time.

Kei Miller 2010