Raymond Antrobus wins £30K Rathbones Folio Prize for debut poetry collection, The Perseverance
Poet and spoken word performer Raymond Antrobus is the winner of the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize.
The annual £30,000 (approx. $51,230.55 Cdn) prize awards the best work for literature of the year, in any form.
The British-Jamaican writer won for his debut poetry collection, The Perseverance, a work that explores the poet's diagnosis with deafness as a child, his mixed heritage as well as his father's alcoholism and later decline into dementia and death.
"It's an exceptionally brave, kind book,: it seemed, in our atomized times, to be the book we most wanted to give to others, the book we all needed to read," the jury said in a statement.
The Perseverance is also currently shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
The 2019 prize was judged by Kate Clanchy, Chloe Aridjis and Owen Sheers.
Northern Ireland's Anna Burns and Indigenous writer Tommy Orange were also among the finalists for the 2019 award.
Burns was nominated for the novel Milkman. Milkman follows a young woman known only as "middle sister." She becomes the target of malicious gossip in her small town when a local paramilitary begins pursuing her, despite her attempts to keep him at bay. The novel won the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
Orange was a finalist for his debut novel, There, There. The novel follows several characters as they all head to Oakland's first Powwow with a range of intentions in mind.
Three other novels on the shortlist included Ordinary People by British writer Diana Evans, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by American Alice Jolly and West by Australian Carys Davies.
Two works of nonfiction were on the shortlist: British writer Guy Stagg for memoir The Crossway and New Zealand's Ashleigh Young for the essay collection Can You Tolerate This?
No Canadians have won the prize since its inception in 2014, though several have been nominated — including Anne Carson in 2014, Rachel Cusk and Miriam Toews in 2015 and Madeleine Thien in 2017.
Past winners include George Saunders for the short story collection Tenth of December, Akhil Sharma for the novel Family Life and Richard Lloyd Parry for the nonfiction work Ghosts of the Tsunami.