The National Poetry Competition is not only Great Britain's most prestigious poetry prize. It's the most generous, paying £ 5,000 for the poem that's judged the best. And it's meant to be the most fair, since all submissions must be previously unpublished and submitted anonymously. But it's possible to tell a bit about the poet, or so the judges must have thought when they awarded this year's prize to "Horse under water," a poem in Jamaican dialect about using a dead horse as bait to fish for sharks:
hundreds of teeth iiiiiichin to bite me dead
an i life de knife but it move slow
for everything cep dis killer move slow in de water
but fear drive my hand
an i slash him in de stomach
The three judges surely thought they had discovered a fresh new voice out of Britain's Caribbean community. But you can't take anything for granted. The crowd was "shocked," according to the Plymouth Western Morning News, when a 62-year-old white woman from Cornwall -- and an unpublished one at that -- showed up at the awards ceremony two weeks ago to claim her prize. Her name is Caroline Carver. She began writing poetry as a hobby about five years ago.
"I don't think they expected a white woman," Carver said. "However, everyone was far too polite to say so."