Lesbian poet Joelle Taylor wins TS Eliot poetry prize
24.01.2022 - 18:06
/ mambaonline.com
Joelle Taylor (Photo: Roman Manfredi / www.joelletaylor.co.uk)
A British lesbian slam poet has won one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry prizes for a collection that focuses on being a butch lesbian in the 1990s.
Earlier this month, Joelle Taylor won the £25 000 TS Eliot poetry prize, the UK’s most lucrative, for her book of poems, C+nto & Othered Poems.
In the book, Taylor – who is also the founder of the British youth slam championships, SLAMbassadors – details her experiences of coming of age in the lesbian club scene in Soho, after being rejected by her conventional family.
Its title refers to cunto, a Neapolitan word that means “to tell someone’s story”, but also alludes to the slang word for female genitalia, while the “Othered” makes abundantly clear the poet’s feelings of living as an outsider.
Taylor’s work often features themes of feminism, childhood abuse and rejection because of one’s identity, and C+nto & Othered Poems again draws on autobiographical details, along with the retelling of the stories of others, in order to illustrate the challenges, hatred and violence facing butch lesbians.
Upon receiving the prize (former winners of which include Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes) Taylor penned an opinion piece for The Independent, calling the recognition from the prize’s judges “a triumphant moment of visibility for butch women”.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Taylor said, “I suppose most of my work over the last 10 years or so, I’ve been really reflecting on my experiences of abuse, but really it’s a wider thing about women as symbol as well. How do we fit our own bodies? So, it’s a very common thing, particularly within the butch community, to kind of really talk about that sort of thing. And with kind