Noah Jacobis an Arab-British poet and performer. She is an editor and columnist for Zindabad Zine and alum of The Writing Room and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, having placed second in the Roundhouse Poetry Slam 2021. She has been featured in SLAMbassadors, Kalopsia Lit, Shubbak Festival and Camden Festival.

Not sure really, and I wasn’t a bookish child, but the first proper novel I read, when I was nineteen, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, made me feel it might be possible to have the thrill of self-recognition in books and gave me an image of a writer I could see a bit of myself in.Scary Monsters was joined on the fiction shortlist by NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea. Constructing a Nervous System won the nonfiction category, while the fiction award was won by Michelle de Kretser for Scary Monsters. The poetry prize was taken by Victoria Adukwei Bulley for her debut collection Quiet. Ruth Awololais a long time reader, writer, appreciator and believer in the power of poetry. She has been performing her own poetry since 2015 and writes for a range of audiences including poetry for children.

Staring at an isolated word, or repeating it aloud, over and over, is a brain-game that can disrupt the cosiest family of letters, and sometimes suggest curious re-alliances. In this week’s poem, from Zaffar Kunial’s second collection, England’s Green, the word chosen for such an adventure is “ foxgloves”. Kunial begins by gently imagining the pleasure of hiding in the middle of his word, where “the xgl is hard to say”. It certainly is: I practised it when no one was listening, and made a sound part kiss, part hiss and part gulp. It sounded like a protest against “the England of its harbouring word”. Mukisa Verrallis a Modern Languages student and Foyle Young Poet based in Manchester. His favourite word is currently scopfrom Old English, meaning shaper, creator, poet. Highlights of the year include the Heaney-esque lyricism of British-Indian poet Zaffar Kunial's accomplished debut Us.' (Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year) My parents. In very different ways, my mother who read a lot of literature and then stopped before she had me, and my father who couldn’t read English at all when he arrived here and wrote in capital letters (e.g. on betting slips and the occasional card, FROM DAD, where he let the other words do the talking).

England’s Green impresses us by making us look again at everything – at England, paying close attention to the landscape of what makes us who we are. He makes the old new and the new old, taking apart our selves and putting us back together again.

Kunial clearly delights in language, with wordplay and differing pronunciations fuelling "Foregrounds" et al. I particularly liked "Foxgloves" ("Sometimes I like to hide in the word / foxgloves - in the middle of foxgloves. The xgl is hard to say") and "The Wind in the Willows," where he wonders if the book title appeals to him just for its sound. They said Constructing a Nervous System was “wholly a deeply moving delight” and a “book unlike any other; a thrilling, generous, spirited and surprising read that remakes culture, redresses history, renews and repurposes everything it touches, and passes on these gifts of reinvention and renewal to everyone who’ll read it.” Adukwei Bulley is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory award. The judges said Quiet was “a quiet revolution of a book – subtle, supple and serious”. I’ve already bought and read the poetry books. And of the ten others, I could choose many, but maybe Margo Jefferson – I’ve loved what I’ve read by Margo before and her title draws me in, too ( Constructing a Nervous System). Zaffar Kunial possesses that rare quality of negative capability which Keats first identified in Shakespeare (a guiding spirit in this, Kunial’s first collection); the poems hold us among mysteries and doubts, without pronouncing or attempting to resolve. Their beauty lies in their indecisiveness – their quiet refusal to settle matters or hold to a single view.' (Rebecca Watts, Times Literary Supplement)

The judges described Scary Monsters as a “work of beautifully composed genius”. “This is a book that troubles and disquiets, dazzles and delights, and with lively wit and intelligence, will also make you laugh darkly,” the judges added. Anthony Cummins in the Guardian described the book as “slyly intelligent”.I was really excited by Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha – how so much was painted in so few words and with so much left out. Aliyah Begumis a nineteen-year-old poet and performer, who was Birmingham’s Young Poet Laureate between 2018-2020. She is a commended Foyle Young Poet and her work has been featured on Young Poets Network, in anthologies and on the radio. She has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, and is currently studying English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. The ten Young Critics are: Ruth Awolola, Davina Bacon, Aliyah Begum, Noah Jacob, Abondance Matanda, Lily McDermott, Holly Moberley, SZ Shao, Mukisa Verrall and Eric Yip.

he does love words. The pleasure he takes in the slipperiness and possibility of language is palpable Literary enrichment follows the light-bearing “ gl” words conjured in line 12. The foxgloves are enchanted into “Oberon’s banks of eglantine” and, although the gul of Gulliver is “shrunken”, it too opens out, and becomes the word which “says ‘rose’ in my fatherland”. Both words “fatherland” and “motherland” are beautifully rediscovered here, newly flowering in the marriage-knot of countries the poet inherits from his parents, his mother’s England and his father’s Pakistan.These intersections are threefold. Firstly, Kunial’s brown skinned Englishness; secondly the two languages of his parents; and thirdly the facility with words of someone who has had to overcome a speech impediment. Let’s take a look at each.