Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards (b. 1979, Newport) works as an English teacher. His poem, ‘Bridge’, is a monologue in the voice of one of the bridges from his hometown of Newport: ‘I bear the city’s weight here on my back, / all these commuting cars and belching vans’. A touching attentiveness to small absurdist details (‘the acupuncture of a gentle moped’) does not obscure a deeper seriousness: of a potential suicide, the bridge reports ‘I know by heart, exactly / what it is to just have too much weight to bear’.

Edwards won the Costa Prize for Poetry in 2015 for his debut collection, My Family and Other Superheroes, and his second collection Gen was nominated for Wales Book of the Year.

Forward Prizes History:

  • 2019 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Bridge’ (The Frogmore Papers)