Matthew Caley wins International Milan Nenadić Prize for Poetry 2025
Photo: Matthew Caley being presented with the International Milan Nenadić Prize for Poetry 2025 by Jovan Zivlak, Director of the Novi Sad Literature Festival
We are very pleased to announce that Matthew Caley has been awarded the International Milan Nenadić Prize for Poetry 2025. He was presented with the award by the Festival Director Jovan Zivlak at the final reading of the 20th International Novi Sad Literature Festival from the Association of Writers, Vojvodina, Serbia, which took place from 1 to 3 September 2025.
Milan Nenadić (1947-2021) was a leading Serbian poet, deeply associated with Novi Sad, who published over 40 books of poetry, translation, essays and literary criticism, most of which were awarded major literary prizes. Previous UK winners of the prize have included Sean O'Brien.
This was Matthew Caley's third time representing the UK at the festival. He read poems from his seventh collection To Abandon Wizardry (Bloodaxe, 2023) from the second floor balcony of an Absolut Vodka Bay above the high street in Novi Sad, and at a more formal reading on the Monday evening; he also presented the prize for the 65th Brankova Nagrada [Branko's Award] for the best Young Poet in Serbia to Simona Dmitrović; and was interviewed about UK poetry by Vesna Savić. Often, his interpreter was Milica Drndarević. His poems were translated by Dragan Babić.
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Matthew Caley has published four collections with Bloodaxe Books, most recently his seventh collection To Abandon Wizardry, which was published in November 2023. This follows his earlier Bloodaxe collections Trawlerman’s Turquoise (2019), Rake (2016) and Apparently (2010).
To Abandon Wizardry explores a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth, or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory.
Scroll down to watch a video of Matthew's joint online launch of 21 November 2023, and to watch his film poem Unicorn Street.
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An excellent review of to To Abandon Wizardry went online in Stride Magazine on 11 June 2024. Read in full here.
'The games Caley plays with simile and metaphor, the word-play, the close observation and the startling timeshifts all create a surface texture that can resemble Surrealism but which usually turns out to be based on a close observation of reality, or, as the poem put it, 'existence without plot' (the bay tree tells the coffee-drinker to 'steal / god's breath'). As Gide said of Henri Michaux, Caley 'excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.' However much one reads Matthew Caley's poems, I suspect one will always be pulling something new from them.' – Dominic Rivron, Stride Magazine
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Unicorn Street: a film poem
Unicorn Street is a film poem made by Jesse Adlam to accompany the poem of the same name from Matthew Caley's seventh collection To Abandon Wizardry (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). Matthew Caley reads the poem 'Unicorn Street' from which the book takes its title and cover image.
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ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT FOR TO ABANDON WIZARDRY
Tuesday 21 November 2023, 7pm GMT, joint online launch event
Matthew Caley launched his new collection alongside MacGillivray and Abigail Parry at this online event celebrating the publication of their new poetry books.
The poets read live and discussed their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available on our YouTube channel.
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Matthew Caley delivered the StAnza Lecture 2020 - Mother, Mother, Ocean - Modernist Women Poets and The Sea on 5 March 2020. To tie with this an 'image, text, sound installation' - a collaboration between Caley and marine biology specialists from St Andrews University - featuring lines from his sixth collection Trawlerman’s Turquoise - was shown throughout the festival. Details of the video poem TRAWL are here. The video is posted below.
Matthew Caley was the guest on the A Mouthful of Air podcast of 17 October 2022. He was reading and discussing his poem ‘My Beautiful Comrade from the North’ from Trawlerman’s Turquoise. Unusually for Matthew, this poem is partially based on a real-life experience. He discussed the extraordinary background to this 'summoning poem', as well as the form of the poem, with host Mark McGuiness. The podcast began and ended with Matthew reading the poem. Listen via the Mouthful of Air website here.
[05 September 2025]
