Jay Bernard is a writer and artist whose works include Surge, The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016) and English Breakfast (Math Paper Press, 2013). A former film programmer at BFI Flare and an archivist at Statewatch, they participated in The Complete Works II project in 2014. Jay was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005 and a winner of SLAMbassadors UK spoken word championship. Their multimedia project, Surge: Side A, won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Their debut collection, Surge (Chatto & Windus, 2019), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Sunday Times Young Writer Award. Since then, among other projects, they have been part of the collaborative pamphlet Siblings (Monitor Books, 2024); released Far from the Start (2024), a newly commissioned sound work; and developed The Last X Years, an online project combining news headlines and over 400 interviews about Brexit. Author photo © Joshua Virasami
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Judges John Burnside (Chair), Sarah Howe and Nick Makoha have chosen the T. S. Eliot Prize 2019 Shortlist from 158 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. Featuring new voices and veteran poets, and covering an extraordinary range of themes, the Shortlist comprises five men, four women and one...
