Michael Symmons Roberts' MANCUNIA is longlisted for the Portico Prize 2019
Photograph: Jonathan Cape
MANCUNIA, the latest poetry collection by Michael Symmons Roberts, has been longlisted for the Portico Prize 2019! Once described as ‘the Booker of the North’, The Portico Prize awards £10,000 to the book that best evokes the spirit of the North of England. The biennial prize is the UK’s only award of its kind, and accepts submissions across all formats including fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, Mancunia is both a real and an unreal city. In part, it is rooted in Manchester, but it is an imagined city too; a fallen utopia viewed from formal tracks, as from the train in the background of De Chirico’s paintings. In these poems we encounter a Victorian diorama, a bar where a merchant mariner has a story he must tell, a chimeric creature—Miss Molasses—emerging from the old docks. There are poems in honour of Mancunia’s bureaucrats: the Master of the Lighting of Small Objects, the Superintendent of Public Spectacles, the Co-ordinator of Misreadings.
Metaphysical and lyrical, the poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’ seventh collection are concerned with why and how we ascribe value, where it resides and how it survives. Mancunia is—like More’s Utopia—both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place. It is occupied, liberated, abandoned and rebuilt. Capacious, disturbing and shape-shifting, these are poems for our changing times.
Superb, substantial and intricately varied…a first-rate collection. —Kate Kellaway, Observer
The Portico Prize Longlist of 17 books explores the myriad themes of identity, belonging, gender, class and the meaning of place – all connected by the spirit of the North. This year’s list includes six debut novels and ten independent publishers, and spans fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, poetry, place writing, biography, a graphic history and travel writing. The shortlist will be announced in November, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony at The Portico Library in January 2020. Find more info here.