Disabled Poets Prize

Jamie is an award-winning theatre maker, poet, (screen)writer, charity CEO, founder and Artistic Director at CRIPticArts. They focus creatively on crip- and queer- realities, and the urgency of living as a disabled person. Their poetry pamphlet, Shield was published in 2021, and read by Jack Thorne in the 2021 MacTaggart lecture, calling them an “extraordinary voice”. Their solo poetry film, NOT DYING, was described as “fantastic” by Hannah Gadsby. In 2021, they were awarded the Jerwood Poetry Fellowship, and won Director/Theatremaker of the Year Award for NOT DYING in the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Awards. Jamie founded CRIPtic x Spread the Word online retreat for deaf and disabled writers in 2020, and ran it in 2021. They have been published in magazines including Magma and the Rialto, guest-edited the ‘Bodies’ issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, and are working on their first full poetry collection.

Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She grew up in Nottingham and lived in East London for seven years before moving north to Cumbria. She has published three poetry pamphlets and two collections – Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) and Much With Body (Seren: 2021), a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation and Laurel Prize 2022 longlistee. Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), a Barbellion-longlisted biography of Dorothy’s later life and illness; and a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability, Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre: 2023), a longlistee of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2024, and Lakeland Book of the Year 2024. Her third nonfiction book is a love song to the owls of Lakeland, The Company of Owls (Elliott and Thompson: 2024). Her work is included in various anthologies, including Moving Mountains (Footnote: 2023).

She works as a freelancer from her home in the English Lake District. In 2023 she and her partner took ownership of historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.

Khairani Barokka is a writer, poet and artist. She was Modern Poetry in Translation’s inaugural Poet-in-Residence, the first non-British Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow. She is currently UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation and Research Fellow at University of the Arts London.

Published internationally in anthologies and journals, Khairani is the author and illustrator of poetry-art book Indigenous Species, nominated for a Goldsmiths Public Engagement Award, author of poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches Press, 2017), co-editor with Ng Yi-Sheng of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Fixi, 2016), and co-editor, with Sandra Alland and Daniel Sluman, of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, 2017), shortlisted for a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology and a Poetry School Book of the Year. Her latest book, poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches Press) was published in March 2021, and was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.