Winner announced – Magma Open Poetry Pamphlet Competition

We are thrilled to announce that Alexa Winik has won our pamphlet competition, and so pleased that we will be publishing her pamphlet early next year – her debut pamphlet, our second ever.  Our competition judge, Mary Jean Chan, said this about Alexa’s entry:

“A worthy winner…Winik’s pamphlet demands equal attention from the reader’s mind and heart as it evokes a tender eco-poetics that blurs the lines between the human and non-human. Crystalline language is coupled with vivid imagery and a keen attention to musicality in this collection.  When I was finalising my shortlist, I read some of these poems aloud, and loved hearing them as much as I appreciated reading them on the page. Overall, this is a sophisticated and thought-provoking collection that deserves to be widely read.”

A poem from Alexa’s entry is in our previous post.  We’ll be publishing another of her poems in Magma 79, due out early spring, along with another poem each from three of the other shortlisted poets, Maia Elsner, Vicky Morris and Mantra Mukim.

Alexa Winik is a Canadian poet based in Edinburgh and the winner of the 2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Her work has been published in magazines such as Gutter, amberflora, ZARF, The Adroit Journal, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere.  She says:

“Winning the Magma pamphlet competition has come as a wholly wonderful surprise. I’m honoured to be in the company of nine remarkable short-listed poets, whose work has felt like a meaningful point of connection at the end of this turbulent, isolating year. This pamphlet will be my first ever published, and I’m so pleased it will find its home with Magma. Most of all, I am grateful to Mary Jean Chan – a poet I deeply admire – for selecting my manuscript and for                                          reading all our poems with great care and curiosity.”