Jenny Mitchell has won the 2022 Shooter Poetry Competition with her powerful familial poem “Female Dedication”.

The poem revolves around hardships experienced by the narrator’s grandmother (as well as her mother), and won Shooter’s prize for its unflinching, spare language and compelling intensity.

Mitchell has previously won the Poetry Book Awards and her debut collection, Her Lost Language, was named a “Poetry Book for 2019” by Poetry Wales. Mitchell’s second collection, Map of a Plantation, is on the syllabus at Manchester Metropolitan University and her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man, was chosen as a Poetry Kit Book of the Month.

A very different type of poem, “Unrequited” by Cara Lowther, came runner-up in Shooter’s 2022 Poetry Competition. Judges enjoyed Lowther’s adept handling of the villanelle form and the poem’s deliciously bittersweet tone. An English student at Warwick University, Lowther contributes regularly to student newspaper The Boar and plans to pursue a career in journalism following graduation.

Both poems are available to read online, and Mitchell’s winning poem will also appear in Shooter’s On the Body issue, which will be published this spring.

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