Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written

.

The first in this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series. 

.

Tim Tim Cheng: Hi, Tom. It’s so nice to finally meet you through the Forward Prizes. I’ve followed your poetry on Instagram for a while and am often struck by how you balance the work of organising, researching and writing. Do you rest at all? How do you ensure some semblance of work-life balance?

To me, poetry is a business of passion. A lot of us write because we feel deeply. After a while ‘writing’ may suddenly sound like ‘publishing’. It’s such a hard road to tread especially given the current socio-economic and geopolitical climates.

Tom Branfoot: Hi, Tim Tim. It’s great to be in touch this way. One of the redeeming aspects of social media is that it allows you to keep in touch with an international community of writers; the parasitic commodification of attention – finite human time – that undergirds it, however, is a considerable downside.

Over the past year or so writing and teaching has become my profession, which is great, as I never thought I’d be in this position – it wasn’t even on the cards growing up. I’m currently writing a novel, thanks to a DYCP grant, which buys me some writing days through the week and that I’m endlessly grateful for. As a Capricorn, grafting is in my astrological veins! All jokes aside, I’ve always had a creative drive, I just wasn’t cut out for the admin that comes with it.

What’s your current situation in Hong Kong? Am I right in thinking you’ve been back and forth between there and Scotland? How did you make time to write The Tattoo Collector, from which ‘Girl Ghosts’ is taken?

Tim Tim: Social media is blocking news, fundraisers, friends’ updates while prioritising rage-bait, advertisements and brain rot content. In some way, its decline is forcing us to reconsider what it truly means to connect with each other, not as ‘followers’, but as colleagues, as very real people…

I’m committed to the long poem; I find it such a mutable, dexterous and vortextual form.

I have been travelling between Hong Kong and Glasgow this year for my close ones and work. In April 2025, the Home Office gave me a five-year Global Talent Visa to work as a poet. Before that, I lived in Edinburgh and London on Student and Graduate Visas. My Gemini self sees many sides and finds it hard to settle down. But I have planned to stay in Glasgow for the entirety of 2026 (hi, future employers!). It’s been so sobering to witness authoritarian decisions in the Anglosphere. It’s as if I have nowhere else to run and must confront them head-on! I also tell my guilt that I could play a small part in keeping Hong Kong’s cultures alive amid ongoing oppression and censorship through translating literature by writers who stay.

Tom: Congratulations on your Global Talent Visa – that must be the only good thing the Home Office has done all year. Things are disastrous in the UK right now; aside from the erosion of freedom of speech, I had to stop the car the other day and tear off a ‘Stop The Boats’ sign that someone had glued to a primary, so we are deep in the stage of confronting things head on. No matter where you are, your art and dedication will be valued. I’m always envious of translators (though I know it’s a financially undervalued vocation) for their depth of reading, the energy and time spent with texts. They must be some of the most discerning and generous readers out there.

Tim Tim: And congratulations on all your projects! I guess one good thing about switching between genres is to stretch different creative muscles. I was excited to learn that your debut collection will be published by the87press in 2026. I don’t think I could edit ‘Girl Ghosts’ and finish The Tattoo Collector without being supported by the DYCP grant to write two days per week for half a year.

Back to your shortlisted poem, ‘A Parliament of Jets’ – I thought it was daring in terms of form and content. It’s a fragmented, long poem that resists easy quotation in the age of attention economy. It’s hypercritical of one’s position(s) and tradition(s) to examine the interconnection between the local and global, the human and non-human. Do you think this poem serves a point of departure for your writing practice, and without sounding too grand, the lineage of pastoral writing?

Tom: For a start, I just want to pick up on your point about the long poem in the attention economy. I’m committed to the long poem; I find it such a mutable, dexterous and vortextual form, while also being an ‘activity’, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis says, for the writer, and an event for the reader, ‘an experience in which you shift scales repeatedly, from structure to detail, from line to sentence, from statement to sound, from visual text to semantic.’ DuPlessis goes on to say that being called in multiple directions by the long poem produces a difficulty in organising attention regardless. In a way, the reader becomes a co-composer, as with a lot of innovative or experimental poetry. I find that active form of reading and writing far more psychologically exciting and rewarding than an anecdotal lyric. And similarly in your writing, by moving between languages, borders and bodies, the reader becomes an active participant.

In terms of the pastoral, I think that the story of England is foremost a story of dispossession. Whenever I write something I forever feel the pull of the creaturely, and also see our webs of damage, the transglobal reverberations of what Daisy Hildyard calls our second body, how by driving along the M1 observing stubble fields drenched in milky twilight, one is also contributing to increased flooding in the Philippines or elsewhere. Thinking about land, or environment, through this lens is a way of suturing our related struggles, and the long poem provides the unregulated, expansive space to suture. Which is to say that the pastoral is an unattainable set of relations and expectations, and the English countryside has never been the biscuit tin idyll we imagine it to be. It’s an arena of inequality, and a site of protest and revolt, as much as urban centres. The pastoral provides us with an idea of how land could be, an idea predicated on exclusion; we can do better than that, and I do think that the countryside needs to be revisited, figuratively and literally, and that inclusion will deepen our understanding of conservation and environmentalism. At the end of the day, how can you care about something you don’t have access to?

From that point, I love how ‘Girl Ghosts’ brings us into a way of being unfamiliar to a lot of Western readers. I’m not afraid to admit that I had to search a lot of the signifiers in your poem, the èhrú, Fuzhou, xìqǔ. Slipping between languages and alphabets deepens the cinematic register of the poem; I feel like so many of your poems feel cinematic, especially ‘Field Notes’. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to land, heritage and nations, and how those relations filter into your poetry?

Tim Tim: Oh, Tom, thanks for your response. I can tell when someone cares on a visceral, strategic level beyond neoliberal, ‘both-side’ discussions that omit power imbalance. Speaking of ‘England’ as ‘a story of dispossession’, I remember hearing Emma Must talk about The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday, her poetry collection on the protests against the extension on the M3 Motorway through Twyford Down in 1992. The protest failed its original goal but led to the eventual abandonment of the ‘£12bn road programme’ across England. After her sharing, I thanked her for the insight, and told her that I resonated with her idea on activism’s ‘quiet victories’ and ‘noisy defeats’ a lot.

The world came into sharper focus for me after environmental protests in Hong Kong, too. Back in 2011, activists, artists and other stakeholders organised to interrogate and/or object to the high-speed rail project connecting Hong Kong to ‘Mainland’ China. Choi Yuen Village was one of the places torn down to make way for the rail. I went to a multi-art festival at the village right before its demolition. I was shocked by how I could not scream slogans with the crowd, ashamed by how I was there for the arts more than the villagers. In 2018, through my work as a teacher, I met some of the activists and villagers during several field trips again. The poem ‘Field Notes’ germinated for more than a decade, somewhere between going back and forth, between ephemerality and persistence.

The English language is a colonial weapon. How you make something beautiful with that is a troubling question. 

I thought the three phrases you used on the porous borders between things could describe ‘Girl Ghosts’ too: ‘second body’, ‘the pull of the creaturely’ and ‘webs of damage’. The first draft of ‘Girl Ghosts’ was tripartite. I thought I would tell the story of my family neatly by place or year with lots of details. It felt off. None of my family would dwell on the bad bits (e.g. my great-granny’s status as an Indonesian maid sold to China; my granny’s status as a mixed-race kid of a maid and landlord who lost everything during the Cultural Revolution). That’s not how working-class migrants survive in British-colonial Hong Kong in the 90s. So, I sped everything up by fictionalising my family and myself into ‘Girl Ghosts’ to summon unresolved issues, unassimilated quirks that made us.

In terms of language, I decided to keep some Mandarin, Hokkien and Indonesian sounds in the poem because I want to hear my family speak. I am more fluent in Cantonese and English, so the translations between the two are less detectable. Thanks for your time in looking up romanised, non-Anglophone words in the poem, too. I often think it’s unfair that people from the rest of the world need to learn English from a very young age, while it’s often optional for people from the Anglosphere to learn other languages. I could go on and on about the perception of multilingualism in the context of the UK, and in East Asia. It’s a colonial legacy we should rectify. After all, the definition of ‘who owns English’ is shifting tremendously. There are more users of English as a second or foreign language than what one would traditionally classify as ‘native speakers’. What are we missing if we still hold onto a sense of linguistic, cultural and national purism?

Tom: I am so loving this conversation. It’s just dawned on me reading your response and looking at a map, how phenomenally distant we are from one another and yet how similar our views are. I think it’s a gift to hear your family speak by including those languages and sounds: it’s a gift of poetry to be able to summon them, and it’s a gift of generosity on your part.

The English language is a colonial weapon; it’s been employed for some of the most gruesome atrocities, imposed onto landscapes that exceed its capacity (J. R. Carpenter’s forthcoming collection p a u s e is about the lasting implications of this process in what we call Canada), used to dismantle the future and was crucial to the transubstantiation, as M. NourbeSe Philip has it, that transformed humans into chattel during the Transatlantic slave trade. How you make something beautiful with that is a troubling question. I agree that questioning ‘who owns English’ in a globalised, post-colonial, yet Anglocentric arena is essential, and I am so grateful for multilingual writing like yours, Don Mee Choi, Johannes Göransson and countless others that forge a hybrid vernacular necessary for our times. Can you recommend any other writers that combine languages in their work?

Tim Tim: I love Nhã Thuyên, Nicholas Wong, Titilayo Farukuoye and Michael Mullen’s work!

How did you design the white space in ‘A Parliament of Jets’? You talked of music-writing in your blog post for the Forward Prizes, what kind of music do you think you are creating in the poem?

Tom: One of the things that I thought hard about when writing ‘A Parliament of Jets’, and Volatile more broadly, was how to balance the lyric desire to sing with the irreconcilable devastation in Gaza and the West Bank. I’ve been reading George Oppen recently and I find it so fascinating that through his work providing relief for the unemployed during the Depression, he developed a materially-rooted distrust of decoration that informed his stark, almost adjective-less poetics. He gave up writing for twenty-five years, believing his time better spent engaged in activism.

I do, however, think that music is essential to a poem, whether that music is rough or sweet, and agree with John Burnside when he says that music ‘refreshes the languages, strengthening it against the abuses of the unscrupulous and the careless.’ How much pressure can lyric withstand before it buckles, mutates into something other? That was one of the reasons for the open field projection of the poem, that and it generates an uncomfortable reading experience where meaning becomes unlatched through harsh enjambment and strange lineation, which is one of the reasons why we’re in this mess, why Israel continues to starve, bomb and collectively punish innocent civilians. Meaning has come undone. Israel refutes wrongdoing while its murderous actions are livestreamed into our palms, meanwhile the British police are arresting peaceful protestors, many elderly and disabled, for silently holding placards in the name of justice.

In the section where words dissolve and coalesce, I was searching for a language-based strategy to demonstrate interconnectivity, and the floating phonemes and clusters visualised perfectly the complicity and entanglement which the poem seeks to expound without resorting to didacticism.

As with most struggles for justice, individual agency comes up against systemic entanglement. Poetry is one method of resistance (though it isn’t enough alone), that bends language away from damage to reshape into something reminding us of our shared humanity. When language is reduced to a market tool, misused to dehumanise people or obfuscate suffering, poems provide space to constellate complex ideas and connections in this volatile present.

I do try different registers and forms a lot. I often feel this pent-up, nebulous energy that propels me to take on different shapes.

Can you tell me about the writing of ‘Girl Ghosts’? In particular, I’m interested in the title and refrain. There’s something very haunting about displacement, and the echoes of violence present (‘Girl ghosts beat each other into meat floss’), but it’s also wonderfully surreal; I feel like the poem doesn’t take itself too seriously. Do you feel like this poem is indicative of your wider work?

Tim Tim: When I wrote ‘Girl Ghosts’, I borrowed a sense of playfulness and cacophony from Sawako Nakayasu’s Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020). Jay Gao, author of Imperium (Carcanet, 2022), my mentor through Scottish Book Trust’s Ignite Fellowship, also called me out on things that didn’t flow. I find creative constraints and not sticking to ‘what really happened’ really generative.

That is different from my earlier experiences as a writer. I used to just document ‘what actually happened’. Later, I realised that people who don’t have ‘the direct experience’ may find the record obscure, given our various backgrounds. But what I could distil from our distinct realities as an individual might speak to a deeper part of another person. In some way, evoking Björk’s ‘All is full of love’, your words will reach somebody, but not the ones you are thinking of. ‘Girl Ghosts’ are reaching readers but not themselves. I don’t know if that’s indicative of my writing. I do try different registers and forms a lot. I often feel this pent-up, nebulous energy that propels me to take on different shapes.

Tom: That’s so interesting. There’s always this gulf between our projection and its reception, between our incantation and the effects of the spell, and crucially between translating experience into language, which is an insufficient technology, but a necessary tool of communication. The way poetry folds temporalities together remains one of its most enigmatic dimensions, at least to me. There’s a long poem in Volatile called ‘Muminent’, about archives, medieval Manchester and my mum’s alcoholism. It has always been fragmented and fluid in how it layers events in a recursive sort of haunting, yet after an invitation to take that idea further by Kimberly Campanello, at readings I’ve started shuffling the pages and reading the ludic rhapsody even more out of joint, and in the book, fragments appear every few pages so that this long poem is stitched through the collection. So I totally feel that pent-up, nebulous energy you talk of that propels innovation.

To shift the dialogue, both our poems were published in independent online journals, Perverse and Ambient Receiver, and I feel like online journals were really well represented in this year’s shortlist. Where do you read and access poetry regularly? Do you have subscriptions to magazines? Are there any outlets that are consistently wonderful in your mind?

Tim Tim: That’s an observant question. I came to learn about the Forward Prizes these few years when I started writing in the UK, and I often find the shortlists a diverse mix of work, some of which really triggers conversations on what is ‘traditionally’ considered ‘good’.

As someone who started out writing in Hong Kong, I read online Anglophone journals before the print-ones, and presses in the Midlands before those in London. It felt surreal to see shelves full of magazines and journals at the Scottish Poetry Library and the National Poetry Library. When I was funded by DYCP, I subscribed to a handful of print magazines and bought single issues here and there. I learned so much from The PN Review, The Poetry Review, Gutter, SPAM, Too Little / Too Hard and Substacks by colleagues and friends. I usually just drop everything I do to read them when new issues are out.

During these two years, I found myself spending more on collections by writers who are still alive, as well as fundraisers for grassroot groups in Palestine, Sudan and Myanmar/Burma. I tell myself I will be able to support magazines more when things are more stable. That said, I appreciated the way The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025 also served as a fundraiser for Medical Aid For Palestinians. I thought it’s a great demonstration that the promotion of good arts and the politics of care are not mutually exclusive. Could you recommend some journals, magazines and presses that you love?

Tom: SPAM, The Poetry Review and TL/TH are ace, I’d add Prototype to that list too. One of the most exciting publications I get through the post is Ludd Gang, the bi-monthly zine from The Poets’ Hardship Fund – a mutual aid fund for skint poets, established in opposition to the punishing orthodoxy of austerity. I would encourage everyone who has the means to donate to the fund. Still Point is a great journal, online and in print, that’s run out of KCL with an exceptional editorial team. A new online journal called Little Mirror has just started in the US, Community Mausoleum publishes long, sequential work and Blackbox Manifold is always worth a read. Over at More Song we’re publishing another fundraiser anthology soon with work from Kimberly Campanello, Caleb Klaces, Rowan Evans and more. Support small presses, grassroots poetry events and mutual aid!

.

.

Tom Branfoot is a writer from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023.

Tim Tim Cheng (she/they) is a poet, translator, editor, and teacher, currently based between Glasgow and Hong Kong. Born and raised in Tin Shui Wai, she is the author of The Tattoo Collector (Nine Arches Press, 2024) and Tapping at Glass (Verve, 2023). They co-edited Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve, 2023) with Jennifer Wong and Jason Eng Hun Lee. She is currently editing Magma 93: Liberation with Isabelle Baafi and Sohini Basak, and translating Ka Yee Lee’s Exposure (Post Script Cultural Collaboration, 2022) from Chinese to English.