John Murillo has won the 2021 Four Quartets Prize for his poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn" from his collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books). Sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the $21,000 prize celebrates "the multi-part poem, and is awarded to a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book in 2020."
Finalists are Don Mee Choi for her book DMZ Colony and Srikanth Reddy for his book Underworld Lit, both published by Wave Books. Each finalist receives an award of $1,000.
Judges said that the winning poem "lights a match and holds us in the flame. In this extraordinary fifteen-sonnet redoublé, the speaker meditates on the recent history of murderous racism in America that makes of Black men targets, and centers in the lyric space Black anger and Black pain. Murillo reminds us that his is a long lineage and each sonnet's epigraph marks the genealogy of resistance Black poets continue to enact. Murillo's anti-elegy demonstrates a lyrical virtuosity, passion, and command of language that makes this work urgent, essential, and enduring."
The Poetry Society of America has videos of the winner and runners up reading from their works: John Murillo, Don Mee Choi and Srikanth Reddy.
---
Julian Barnes is the recipient of the $10,000 Jerusalem Prize, recognizing a writer whose work best expresses and promotes the idea of "freedom of the individual in society." He accepted the award during the opening session of the Jerusalem International Book Forum (held virtually this year) and expressed his thanks to the prize jury, as well as his hope to travel to Jerusalem for the 2022 Book Forum, to receive the prize in person.
The jury said, in part, that "Barnes's greatness is to be found in his ability to think and express himself not only in words but in notes and keys, similes and metaphors, ruminations and silences, and to alchemize those elements into strong, glowing literature."