Caselberg Trust Poetry Prize: Winners Announced

The winners of the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize for 2011 have been announced.
The competition was judged by the distinguished poet Bernadette Hall, who awarded the first prize of $500 for ‘After Reading Auden’ by Mary McCallum, of Eastbourne, while second prize of $250 went to ‘Home to you’, by Michele Amas, of Wellington.
Both winning poems will be published in May in Landfall 221.

A further five entries rated Highly Commended came from Lee Posna and Natasha Dennerstein (both of Wellington), Victoria O’Sullivan (Waitakere City), Therese Lloyd (Wellington), and Maris O’Rourke (Auckland). There is no monetary award in this category, but the five poems, along with the two winning entries, will be published on the Caselberg Trust website during May (http://www.caselbergtrust.org/) .

The competition attracted 237 entries from poets around New Zealand and in several overseas countries. Bernadette Hall, who judged all the entries blind, praised the winning poem for being ‘ambitious… and full of curiosity’. She described the runner-up as ‘an audacious love poem’, and congratulated the Caselberg Trust for attracting ‘a lively and interesting run of new work’. ‘That has to be good for NZ poetry,’ she said.

Bernadette Hall, a former Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, lives in North Canterbury; this year she is a Teaching Fellow at the International Institute of Modern Letters, at Victoria University in Wellington. The Lustre Jug is her most recent collection of poems.

Mary McCallum (pic left) is a published poet and founder of the international Tuesday Poem blog who has worked in journalism and teaches creative writing; her Montana award-winning novel The Blue was published in 2007.

Dunedin born Michele Amas was a finalist in the Montana first book of poetry awards in 2006 with her book After the Dance. She has a Masters in creative writing from Victoria University and for more than 20 years has worked as an actor and director in theatre and television.

The Caselberg Trust was established in 2006 at Broad Bay on the Otago Peninsula to buy and renovate the former home of painter Anna Caselberg and writer John Caselberg. The Caselberg house is now a residence for writers and artists, and the Trust undertakes a range of innovative arts events. The most recent, ‘A New Line’, paired eight jewellers with eight poets, with each presenting work inspired by their partner’s creations.