Claudia Rankine's Citizen wins Forward poetry prize

Citizen: An American Lyric, described by jury as a ‘powerful book for our time’, collects £10,000 award for best collection

Claudia Rankine. Photograph: John Lucas/Graywolf Press

Mark Brown Arts correspondent - The Guardian -Monday 28 September 2015 

A book described by one critic as eavesdropping “on America and a racism that has never gone away” has won the top award at the 2015 Forward prizes for poetry.

Claudia Rankine has already won the National Book Critics Circle award in the US for Citizen: An American Lyric. On Monday night at a ceremony in London she was named winner of the Forward prize for best collection.

Citizen was described by the jury as a “powerful book for our time”. The chair of judges, AL Kennedy, added: “This is writing we can recommend with real urgency and joy. It’s a stylistically daring poetic project about the dehumanisation of those deemed outsiders ‐ we found it exhilarating and genuinely transformative.”
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