Helen Dunmore wins National Poetry Competition

Writer best known for her novels, who submitted work at the last minute 'on impulse', takes £5,000 award for single poem 'The Malarkey'

'I've written very few poems over the last four years' ... Helen Dunmore. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Read the winning poem here

Story by Alison Flood,  guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 March 2010

Picking through the 10,467 anonymous entries for this year's National Poetry Competition, judges and poets Ruth Padel, Daljit Nagra and Neil Rollinson were sure of their winner, "The Malarkey", which Padel described as "completely arresting in its quietness [and] hidden strength". When they discovered it was by Orange prize-winning novelist and poet Helen Dunmore, "we all threw our hats in the air", said Padel.

The haunting, carefully structured poem about loss sees an unidentified narrator asking "Why did you tell them to be quiet / and sit up straight until you came back? / The malarkey would have led you to them ... You looked away just once / as you leaned on the chip-shop counter, / and forty years were gone." Dunmore, whose novel about an incestuous sibling relationship during the 1930s, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange prize, is best-known for her fiction, but has published nine collections of poetry. She hadn't entered the National Poetry Competition "for many, many years", and submitted "The Malarkey" at the last minute, just before the deadline closed, "on an impulse".
Read Alison Flood's full report at The Guardian online.