Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2024 – winners announced

The winners of the 2024 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize have been announced. The competition is now in its fourteenth year, and this year attracted 142 poems from New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, UK, and Mauritius.  This year’s competition was judged by poet Alan Roddick.

This year’s winner is Rangi Faith (Kai Tahu, Ngati Kahungunu, English, Scottish) from Rangiora for his poem “The Valley where Compassion Died”.  Runner up is Philip Armstrong from Ōtautahi Christchurch for his poem “Time of Death”.  The winner receives $500 and a week’s stay at the Caselberg House.  The runner up poet receives $250.  Winning poems and Alan’s judge’s report will be published in November in Landfall 248 – Spring 2024.

The judge also recognised three poems with Highly Commended awards -  “There’s always an edge here” by James Norcliffe (Ōtautahi Christchurch), ‘the archaeology of home’ by Jeni Curtis (Ōtautahi Christchurch), and ‘Winds of change” by Sherryl Clark (Whangarei). These poems, along with the winning entries and the judges report, will be published on the Caselberg Trust website in late November.

In his judge’s report Mr Roddick noted that “the poems entered were ‘about’ love, loss, the natural world, childhood, angst, and today’s big issues, especially climate change” and “There were poems this year in ‘shaped verse”, “free’ verse, sonnet form, prose poems, ballads, haiku, the sestina…”

Of Rangi Faith’s winning poem ‘The Valley where Compassion Died’, Mr Roddick noted that “This poem is a memorial to men who died in the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, but the inscriptions here are not what we have come to expect on cenotaphs” and “I found the last stanza almost unbearable to read aloud, knowing that after the first line there would be a second, and then a third, because the utterance makes the verse-form, and the stanza must be completed. I salute the writer of this poem.”