THE HUME PRIZE WINNER 2019-2020 is WHYT PUGH

We at BSPG combined the Hume prize into a biannual event over the past two years, and in the process, our distinguished judge, writer, poet, and journalist, Christopher Jackson, selected a winner from an impressive list - and they will get the 2000 pound advance and publishing deal with Eyewear/ Black Spring Press.

So, here they are!

WHYT PUGH

is the 2018 winner of the AmeriCymru Poetry Prize and 2011 recipient of the Terry Hetherington Young Writers’ Award - their poetry and short stories have been published in Sand Hills Literary Review, Genre: Urban Arts, West Trade Review, Still: The Journal, six Chevalanthologies published by Parthian, Opening Chapter’s Secondary Character and Other Stories, The Seventh Quarry, and the New Welsh Review’s online platform. Whyt holds a PhD in Literature from the University of South Wales where they taught Literary Theory and Romanticism until 2015. 

Winner's Statement:

'In the writing of The Light of Stars Long Ceased to Be, I set out to examine separation, longing, and the fracturing of identities. With the hope that this collection might offer some resonance to those facing such crises, I am so very grateful for the opportunity to share the book through the Melita Hume Prize and Eyewear/Black Spring Press.'

 CHRISTOPHER JACKSON judge

was educated at Charterhouse School, the University of Nottingham, and the College of Law. Qualifying first as a solicitor, he subsequently worked for many years as a journalist with work appearing in The Times, Country Life, The New Statesman, Mail on Sunday, City AM and numerous trade publications. His books include The Fragile Democracy (2016), Roger Federer (2017), Theresa May (2018) and several poetry collections. He appears regularly on television and radio outlets including Sky, Bloomberg, BBC Radio 4, and LBCdiscussing politics and literature.

JUDGE'S CITATION:

I greatly enjoyed judging the Melita Hume Prize. Each entry was a reminder, amid the strain of lockdown, of the vibrancy of voice, and the certainty that poetry has its role to play in our shared way forward. After finding many voices who I am sure we will hear more from in the coming years, I found Whyt Pugh's The Light of Stars Long Ceased to Be. 

Pugh's poetic world is a place where human insight is linked irrevocably to far-off galaxies - it is a book which attempts to come to terms with the enormity of the universe by creating a large inner imaginative space. It does so by sourcing in confident language the 'inconsolable ebb' of the universe - as if something true has been fetched from the other side of the universe, and found expression here. Their book is a realisation that patterns out there may have some relevance here where we face our political reckonings (in a 'Rotten Nationalist America') and our injustices, or 'theMachiavellian misogynistic masochism', as Pugh calls it. In spite of its large temporal and spatial ambitions it is also a book for our time.