Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2024 – Poetry bundle

A powerful debut which interrogates the nature of love in all its various forms, The Cyprian confronts some of our primary questions about love: how is it possible to accept the death of the beloved? What role does deception play in love? When does love become a force of exploitation? The collection is composed of five parts, reflecting the different aspects of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.

The poems in this new collection by Luke Beesley – a master of the surreal and the observational – capture the exact moment of writing: how, from it, possibilities branch out into observation, memory, word play, analogy, fantasy, other artworks and other art forms. The book is intimate, familial, often moving; it is also sparklingly clever and alert to the imaginative possibilities that can open out from the minutiae of days.

Royal’s new collection explores the staging of the emotional life, drawing its strength from its confrontation with grief and mourning. Her use of the elegiac form offers no answers, only the hope of tearing open conventional understandings of loss and insecurity. As Maria Takolander says: ‘Royal is unafraid to spark light in the darkest of places.’