Exeter student Jennifer Kim wins coveted Jon Stallworthy Poetry Prize
Congratulations to Exeter postgraduate student Jennifer Kim (2022, MSt History of Art) on recently being awarded the Jon Stallworthy Poetry Prize by the Faculty of English. The topic for this year’s prize was ‘Disgrace,’ inviting participants to navigate the contradiction between ‘grace’ and the negative prefix attached to it.
Jennifer’s winning poem is titled Trente et Quarante – After Lucian Freud’s “The Big Man” (1976), painted to repay his gambling debts. It beat over 90 entries submitted by Oxford postgraduate students.
The competition is held annually and was set up in memory of the late Professor Jon Stallworthy (1935-2014) who was a poet and Fellow of Wolfson College. A prize of £1000 is awarded by two judges, the Professor of Poetry Alice Oswald and Professor Bernard O’Donoghue.
The award ceremony for this year’s prize took place at Wolfson College on 18 January, and involved readings of the winning and shortlisted poems.
A YouTube video of the award ceremony will be available to watch shortly on the Wolfson College website, and later this year the shortlisted poems will be published in the annual Jon Stallworthy Poetry Prize booklet, which will be available to read in Oxford libraries.
