Jay Bernard wins Ted Hughes new poetry award

Image copyright Jay Bernard

A London poet has won a £5,000 prize for new poetry for a performance work investigating a 1981 south London fire in which 13 black youngsters died.

Jay Bernard received the Ted Hughes Award for Surge: Side A, performed at the Roundhouse in London last year.

The New Cross Fire in Deptford, which some feared may have been a racist arson attack, is considered a defining moment in Black British history.

Bernard is a film programmer at BFI Flare, London's LGBTQ+ film festival.

Bernard's poem beat six others to the award, which is funded by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

The work was praised by the judges for its "intensely personal relating of the New Cross massacre" and its "honesty and vulnerability".

Dom Bury, from Devon, was named the winner of this year's National Poetry Competition at the same awards ceremony on Wednesday.

His poem, The Opened Field, was chosen out of more than 13,000 entries to receive the £5,000 prize.

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