John is delighted to have won Third Prize in the 2020 Wales Poetry Award with his poem Caliban. The winners were announced on Wednesday 24 March 2021. You can read all the winning and highly commended poems here and see the video of the award ceremony here.

'Caliban is a passionate praise poem to vanishing beastness, to the sensory life of earth. Within its thicket-like stanzas we're offered a vision of nature as experienced by animals and the animal in us. This should be impossible to achieve, since we can't know the ineffable consciousness of an animal. But every time I read it out aloud–which it has to be read out loud–I felt as if I was taken on a journey experiencing a walk as a dog or a super-sensed human alert to every scent and texture. The fact that the 'manimal' is called Caliban adds infinite layers of meaning and association.'  Pascale Petit Judge Wales Poetry Award 2020