Thursday 27 June 2019 11:05am
English PhD candidate Robyn Pickens (fourth from left) with judges and finalists at the Brotherton Poetry Prize award ceremony in Leeds in June.
Bracing herself for polite rejection, Otago English PhD candidate Robyn Pickens says she was stunned to recently receive an email naming her as a finalist in the international Brotherton Poetry Prize.
Earlier this year Robyn joined 400 other entrants submitting a portfolio of up to five poems for judging.
The inaugural prize, which is supported by the University of Leeds Poetry Centre, was open to anyone in the world over the age of 18 who was yet to publish a full collection of poems.
Robyn recites one of her poems at the Leeds event.
At a ceremony in Leeds in early June Dane Holt, a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, was named winner and Robyn was delighted to be a finalist alongside Sheffield-based Pete Green, Maeve Henry from Oxford, and Majella Kelly from Tuam in Ireland.
As a finalist, Robyn’s work will appear in a forthcoming anthology published by Carcanet Press and she may be invited to poetry readings in the UK.
She was at the awards ceremony, which was held immediately after a conference on Art in the Anthropocene that she attended at Trinity College, Dublin.
Robyn, whose thesis is entitled The eco-poetics of love: Eros, ritual, and syntropy in the work of Juliana Spahr, CAConrad, and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, says her studies have helped with the development of her style.
“As I'm doing a critical/creative PhD I have the opportunity to read both academic writing and poetry – both forms of writing have helped my work develop.”
She started writing poetry in 2016, and experiences at local events galvanised her interest in the creative and performative aspects of poetry.
“Early that year I attended a poetry evening organised by the Octagon Collective and felt the poem on the page come alive in a way that I hadn't experienced before. It made me want to write. I mainly write about everyday events as they intersect with ecological issues, and would describe my poetry as lyrical and in love with language.”
Robyn’s writing has appeared in Turbine|Kapohau, The Pantograph Punch, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Art New Zealand, Art News, The Physics Room Annual, Enjoy Gallery’s Occasional Journal, and exhibition catalogues. She is also an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times, and was Blue Oyster Art Project Space’s 2016 summer writer-in-residence on Quarantine Island Kamau Taurua.