Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets

The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets are annual Awards for pamphlets published in the UK. The Awards aim to promote the pamphlet form and to enable poets and publishers to develop. Since their inception, they have grown to include four awards, for ‘Poetry Pamphlet’, ‘Publisher’, ‘Illustration’ and ‘Poetry Pamphlet in a Celtic Language’, carrying prizes of up to £5,000, and awarding places on ‘The Michael Marks Poets in Residence Program’ in Greece.

The Awards were founded in 2009 by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in a collaboration with the British Library which continues to this day. They are funded entirely by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, and are enabled through partnerships between the British Library, the Wordsworth Trust, The TLS and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, and in association with the National Library of Wales and the National Library of Scotland. As of 2012, the Awards are administered by Wordsworth Trust. The Michael Marks Charitable Trust trust was established in 1966 by the late Lord Marks, 2nd Baron of Broughton.[1] Both awards carry a prize of £5,000.[2]

The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney praised the prize's establishment: “These inspired awards recognise that the pamphlet has a fundamental importance in literary culture far exceeding anything suggested by the dictionary – “a brief publication, generally having a paper cover”. For many of the best poets now writing it was not only their first means of distribution but the first ratification of their gift.”[3]