We have a winner
Dear friends far and wide, we have some good news: British poet Fee Griffin has won the inaugural Amsterdam Open Book Prize with her collection “For Work/For TV”, and Zimbabwean poet Tanatsei Gambura has been chosen as our runner-up with her collection “Things I Have Forgotten Before”.
This is not going as planned, of course. When we announced our move into book publishing last fall, we had a very different future in mind.
We recognize the scarce bandwidth to absorb news like this right now. In sharing this, we hope to join the choir of good news out there and honor Fee and Tanatsei for their beautiful works. We also want to thank everyone who supported us in our first steps towards becoming a press, and entrusted us with your collections––may all of your books find good homes!
The Versal team will begin production of our inaugural title “For Work/For TV” in the coming weeks. It is a welcome undertaking in this time of disquietude. We hope you will join us in congratulating these two writers, as well as our finalists!
Sending you all strength and safety,
Versal Editions
“When the last garden centre is built
no-one will know it is the
last garden centre
because
of course
it will be built in a time when
building garden centres
Is still considered a
reasonable response
to the
question of
being alive.”
“For Work/For TV”
Winner
Fee Griffin studied Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln, where she serves as a poetry editor for The Lincoln Review. She has poetry and other writing published or forthcoming in Poetry London, The Abandoned Playground, Channel, Partisan Hotel, and in an anthology with Dunlin Press. She lives near the North Sea and works seasonally for an arts festival, taking cleaning jobs for the rest of the year. “For Work/For TV” will be her first collection of poetry.
“Things I Have Forgotten Before”
Runner up
Tanatsei Gambura is a poet, organizer, and cultural producer from Harare, Zimbabwe who is based in Edinburgh, UK. Drawing from personal experience, her work explores the themes of black womanhood in the context of post-colonial immigration, global geopolitics, and cultural identity. Poems of hers have been published in anthologies and by journals including the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Prufrock Magazine, POVO Afrika and New Coin Poetry Journal. Currently, Tanatsei is pursuing a degree in Intermedia Art through research-based practice at the University of Edinburgh.