The two runners up of the competition are Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi and Rhiya Pau. Bobi’s poems, ‘The Final Words of a Stage-IV Cancer Patient to Cancer Cells’, ‘a new era’, and ‘a spade isn’t just a spade’ are three reflections on time in the context of death and Hauza proverbs.
Pau’s poems, ‘Enough’ and ‘Entropy’ consider the passage of time and familial experiences across generations. ‘Enough’ won the Platinum Poetry Prize in 2021 Creative Future Writers’ Award and was first published in their corresponding anthology ‘Essential’. ‘Entropy’ was first published in Pau’s debut collection ‘Routes’ (Arachne Press, 2022).
The competition was initiated to respond to and feed into a research project co-led by Professor Patricia Kingori at Oxford Population Health’s Ethox Centre. After the End seeks to understand who decides when something, such as a major global event like the COVID-19 pandemic, has ended. How do different ideas of the ‘the end’ reproduce pre-existing structural inequalities? What would a focus on after the end of events mean for the way we think about time?
The After the End poetry competition, which is co-led by Professor Kingori and Professor Laura Salisbury at the University of Exeter, invited creative responses from poets that critically engage with the idea of time and temporality and the question of who gets to say when something has ended. There were 270 entries from entrants in 13 countries.
Read the full story on the Oxford Population Health Ethox Centre's website.