The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2010 :
The winner of the 2010 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize is Kona Macphee for Perfect Blue. The 2010 judges were Kate Kellaway, Bernard O’Donoghue and Stephen Romer.
The Judges commented:
‘We looked at over 30 submitted books, and we reduced their number in stages, first to 14 and then to a final six. The writers ranged from a number of established figures to some who were entirely new to us: a variety that made the reading very absorbing. In the end we agreed to award the prize to Kona Macphee’s Perfect Blue (Bloodaxe). Her compassion, seriousness and technical accomplishment were all evident over a wide range of subjects and forms. She can also describe moments of vulnerability directly and with courage. It was a book that we found ourselves returning to. What impressed us most of all was the way that Macphee’s work combined clarity and depth with a surprising and sometimes unsettling view of the world.'
Perfect Blue
From the natural world to war and politics, from memories of childhood to bittersweet snapshots of everyday life, from wry asides to fantastical flights of narrative fantasy - Kona Macphee applies her versatile and polished technique to a characteristic diversity of themes in her second book of poems.Her eclecticism is never more apparent than in the Book of Diseases sequence, which launches from its simple premise into a delirious medley of forms and subjects. The meticulously crafted lyrical poems of Perfect Blue reflect the growing power of a distinctively original, musical and compassionate voice that laments the transience and fragility of life while celebrating the joy of truly living it.
Kona Macphee was born in London and grew up in Australia. She studied musical composition at the Sydney Conservatorium, violin at the University of Sydney, and computer science and robotics at Monash University, later taking an M.Sc. at Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar. She received an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1998, and has published two collections with Bloodaxe, Tails (2004) and Perfect Blue (2010). She is a freelance writer and software developer, and lives in Crieff, Perthshire.
The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize is a prize of £1,000 awarded annually and is given on alternate years for a volume of verse and for a volume of prose fiction. The 2010 prize is for a volume of verse. The conditions governing the award of the prize are set out in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.For further information, please contact Rachel Alexander, Publicity Director at Faber on 020 7927 3883 or at rachel.alexander@faber.co.uk.
Previous Winners:
1964 Christopher Middleton and George Macbeth (joint)
1965 Frank Tuohy
1966 Jon Silkin
1967 William McIlvanney and John Noone (joint)
1968 Seamus Heaney
1969 Piers Paul Read
1970 Geoffrey Hill
1971 J. G. Farrell
1972 Tony Harrison
1973 David Storey
1974 John Fuller
1975 Richard Wright
1976 Douglas Dunn
1977 Carolyn Slaughter
1978 David Harsent and Kit Wright (joint)
1979 Timothy Mo
1980 Hugo Williams and George Szirtes (joint)
1981 J. M. Coetzee
1982 Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon (joint)
1983 Graham Swift
1984 James Fenton
1985 Julian Barnes
1986 David Scott
1987 Guy Vanderhaeghe
1988 Michael Hofmann
1989 David Profumo
1990 Michael Donaghy
1991 Carol Birch
1992 Paul Muldoon
1993 Will Self
1994 John Burnside
1995 Livi Michael
1996 Kathleen Jamie
1997 Emily Perkins
1998 Don Paterson
1999 Gavin Kramer
2000 Kathleen Jamie
2001 Trezza Azzopardi
2002 Greta Stoddart
2003 Justin Hill
2004 Glyn Maxwell
2005 David Mitchell
2006 Alice Oswald
2007 Ed Docx
2008 Nick Laird
2009 David Szalay
2010 Kona Macphee