sheenaghpugh | Poets 1, Publishers 0

There should currently (or soon, depending when she gets around to it) be much rejoicing on the blog of Joanna Preston, A Dark Feathered Art Joanna, a graduate of the Glamorgan Masters in Writing who now lives in New Zealand, had sent her poetry collection The Summer King, which was more or less her Masters submission, to various UK publishers, Cape, Seren, Faber, Carcanet and Salt, and they'd all turned it down. This collection has now won the prestigious inaugural Kathleen Grattan Prize, judged by Fleur Adcock, and will be published by Otago University Press. From the press release:

The winner will receive $16,000, making it the richest poetry prize in New Zealand, and publication by Otago University Press. Such was the high quality of the entries that the judge, distinguished poet Fleur Adcock, found it hard to choose a winner, until she gave 'marks for technical skill, originality, verve, wit and humanity. In the end I chose as the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award: The Summer King by Joanna Preston.'

Joanna Preston is an Australian-born poet living in Christchurch. She grew up in various outback towns in New South Wales, with her grandparents' farm a constant, and started writing at an early age. She holds a BA in Theatre and Film Studies and has lived in New Zealand since 1994, apart from a spell in the United Kingdom during which she received an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan. She has been a member of the Airing Cupboard Women Poets group, Canterbury Poets Collective, and The Australian Haiku Society. Her work has received a number of awards and appeared in numerous publications. The Summer King will be her first published collection.

Moral: as I keep telling frustrated friends and ex-students, the editor or publisher who just sent you that letter is not called Moses: his rejection was not written on stone tablets and may have been for all manner of reasons other than literary quality, and there is always the chance that he was simply WRONG.... the thing is to maintain an ego the size of a bus and keep sending the stuff out. The collection's good, btw; I say so and I'm NEVER wrong....