Emilie Jelinek wins Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024
'Even in their brief moments of harmony, she deftly moves from safety to threat' – Imtiaz Dharker, Judge for the 2024 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition
Emilie Jelinek has been announced as winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024. Her winning pamphlet The Sky Around My Father will be co-published by Bloodaxe Books and Mslexia on 25 September 2025 as part of the prize, which was judged by Imtiaz Dharker. The winner was revealed by Mslexia in their Summer 2025 issue. This is Emilie Jelinek's second pamphlet, following her debut, Wing Formula (Against the Grain Press, 2023).
‘Emilie Jelinek crafts a set of poems heavy with storm warnings, stalked by the presence of the father who carries a burden of rage passed down generations, ‘a man cut in half by history’… Through the ever-narrowing landscape of the man she knows, she contrives to suggest, with great skill and delicacy, not only a daughter’s pain and struggle to comprehend, but a whole nation’s turbulent history.’ – Imtiaz Dharker, Judge of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition
An interview with Emilie Jelinek and a poem from her winning pamphlet are featured on the Mslexia website here.
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The Sky Around My Father charts the estrangement between a daughter and her charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music — where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek’s sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal narrative and compressed lyric poems, she captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond — its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather.
Emilie Jelinek won the 2024 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker with her second pamphlet, The Sky Around My Father (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2025), following her debut, Wing Formula (Against the Grain Press, 2023). She won second prize in both the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2023 and the Wells Open Poetry Prize in 2024, where she also received the Hilly Cansdale Award. She was a finalist in Mslexia’s Poetry Competition in 2023 and was highly commended in the Belfast Book Festival’s Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the McLellan Poetry Competition in 2022. She was awarded a distinction for her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2023. She grew up in Belgium and France and has spent her career working for international organisations in Russia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar and West Africa, returning to the UK in 2014. She lives in Bath.
'In these elegant and unflinching poems, Emilie Jelinek sets out on a voyage of exploration, through storm and rough weather, to the land of her father. This is beautiful work: unafraid to examine how love, history and grief can painfully intertwine, and those we long for become unreachable to us.' – Liz Berry
‘These poems are exemplary in the measured way they answer Emilie Jelinek's need for a reckoning with her troubled and violent father. The recorded facts may be shocking, but through a variety of approaches and devices, including sometimes surprising but always apt metaphor, both justice and a degree of mercy are achieved. A new, true poet rests her case.’ – Christopher Reid
'Emilie Jelinek’s forthright, highly courageous collection The Sky Around My Father is a hymn to unsolvable complexity – the father is enormous, unnegotiable: he is the manspreading presence in the long shadow of whom a furious /perplexed / disbelieving daughter attempts to find the most forgiving angle, the '…place where tenderness might grow.' Jelinek makes the dynamic entirely her own – the father gets in the way of everything: her poems cut their pathway around, then through him. Undercutting this sequence of love poems – because that’s exactly what they are – is a terrible ambivalence. With its exquisitely rendered variations, this is a first-rate collection that significantly adds to the dysfunctional father canon.’ – Tim Liardet
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Bloodaxe Books took over the publication of the winning pamphlets in the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition in 2022. Prior to that, the competition was judged by Seren's now retired poetry editor Amy Wack with the pamphlets published by Seren. Bloodaxe took over from Seren with effect from the 2022 competition, which was judged by Imtiaz Dharker. Two previous winners, Sarah Wimbush (in 2019) and Yvonne Reddick (2016), went on to have their first book-length collections taken on by Bloodaxe. Four winners, Polly Atkin (2012), Cath Drake (2013), Ilse Pedler (2015) and Bryony Littlefair (2017), had book-length collections published by Seren, while Mara Bergman (2012) was taken up by Arc and Jane Lovell by Indigo Dreams. The first winner to be published by Bloodaxe was Courtney Conrad (2022) for her pamphlet I Am Evidence, which went on to win the 2023 Michael Marks Poetry Award. The winner of the 2023 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition was Nia Broomhall for her debut pamphlet Backalong.
[03 June 2025]
