The Forward Prizes for Poetry are considered the most influential awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland, and 2021 marks the prize\u2019s 30th year. Notes on the Sonnets<\/i> is the first Penned in the Margins title to win a Forward Prize, and one of a handful in the awards\u2019 history to have been published by a publisher outside poetry\u2019s \u2018big five\u2019.<\/p>\n
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On receiving the award at the ceremony on Sunday 24 October at London\u2019s Southbank Centre, a visibly emotional Kennard told the audience, \u2018This feels really very strange and I\u2019m extremely grateful and thank you so much to the judges for liking this weird book.\u2019<\/p>\n
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He also thanked Tom Chivers, his editor at Penned in the Margins, who said, \u2018I was stunned and ecstatic that Luke Kennard won this year’s Forward – one of British poetry’s major accolades – and am excited that it will be read by even more people now. Notes on the Sonnets<\/i> is everything that is brilliant about Luke’s work. It’s smart, weird, risk-taking, totally unique and very funny. And – I know it’s a cliche – this couldn’t happen to a lovelier man. Well done, Luke.\u2019<\/p>\n
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Photographed above with fellow shortlisted poets Stephen Sexton and Kayo Chingonyi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Luke Kennard has won a top poetry accolade for his \u2018joyously unclassifiable\u2019 collection Notes on the Sonnets<\/i>, which recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[81,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20451"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20459,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20451\/revisions\/20459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}