Herne Hill poet Jessa Brown has just been awarded the prestigious Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize for her poem Greygoose, Johanna.
Jessa, a poet, lyricist and heritage educator, says, ‘My inspiration for the poem came directly from the heritage work I was doing in Southwark Archives. In a local archive, you see traces of so many ordinary people – women especially – that are fragmentary, often no more than a name in a workhouse record. These are the people who did not hold the pen in their lifetimes, whose personal histories can only really be imagined. When we think about the Romantics and the Romantic period, we naturally romanticise exile as almost a grand or noble gesture – Byron’s sexy escape to the continent, or Keats’ tragic ending in Rome. But I was interested in the simultaneous and far more common historic reality of internal exile – exile from within your own country, city, or community, often for the sheer crime of being poor, being a woman, being without family, being unable to work. Johanna Greygoose’s name stood out to me in the workhouse records as suggestive of so much more than the life she likely endured. While I needed to acknowledge hardship and incarceration in the poem, I also wanted to imagine this working class woman’s quiet resistance, endurance, and, in the end, that most ambiguous and Romantic of notions – freedom.’
The award is a celebration of the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death, those submitting entries to the Keats-Shelley Prize and Young Romantics Prize poetry competitions were invited to submit a poem, contemporary in style, on the theme of ‘Exile’.
Chair of the judges, acclaimed author and historian Tom Holland, said of this year’s Prize winners:
‘What a wonderful event the Keats Shelley Prize is. Two centuries on, the great Romantic poets are still capable of doing what they have always done: inspiring great poetry and prose.’
Jessa intends to put the award to good use: ‘Winning the Keats-Shelley Prize is an honour. The prize money will allow me to spend time finishing my pamphlet (which my winning poem will feature in), which reimagines the lives of some of those least represented in history through archives. I could not be more grateful to the trustees, the organisers, the judges – and the Romantics themselves!’
You can read Jessa’s winning poem here: https://keats-shelley.org/prize_entries/Keats-Shelley_Prize_2024.pdf
