Welcome to the home page of British poet Victor Tapner.
The site contains a selection of published work, including the poems Kalashnikov, winner of the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition, and Dancing for Monsieur Degas, winner of Scotland's Wigtown competition, together with a number of other prizewinners.
Waiting to Tango
My latest collection Waiting to Tango won Templar Poetry's Straid Award and was launched in 2016 at Keats House in London.
It views the world through the prism of history and a cast of characters from the realms of art, music and science: Hepworth to Haydn, the Curies, Jacqueline Kennedy, Alan Turing and others. Building on my previous collection Flatlands, it spans the centuries from the Renaissance to the nuclear age.
Copies can be bought through the Templar Poetry website and on Amazon, using the links below:
Templar Poetry:
http://templarpoetry.com/collections/new-collections-pamphlets/products/waiting-to-tango
Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_8?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=victor+tapner&sprefix=victor+t%2Caps%2C134
The Limitations of Artificial Intelligence is a series of dramatic lyrics that won
The New Writer magazine's 2008 poetry collection prize. Several of those poems, as well as some other prizewinners, are included in Waiting to Tango.
Banquet in the Hall of Happiness
Banquet in the Hall of Happiness is the 2015 winner of the Munster Literature Centre's Fool for Poetry chapbook competition. It was launched with a reading at the Cork International Poetry Festival in Ireland in February 2016, and is published by Southword Editions. A sequence of poems published on this website and included in the collection was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2013.
To purchase copies of Banquet in the Hall of Happiness:
http://www.munsterlit.ie/Winners_Fool%20for%20Poetry.html
Flatlands
A full-length collection of poems set in Britain's deep tribal past, Flatlands came out in 2010 from Salt Publishing. The cycle, which seeks to bring to life more than 2,000 years of East Anglian prehistory from the late Stone Age to the Roman invasion, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry and won the poetry prize in the East Anglian Book Awards as well as the International Rubery Book Award in 2014. Part of the cycle won the Writers Inc. Writers-of-the-Year bursary in 2005. You can read excerpts from the book on this site.
Copies can be bought through the Salt Publishing website or on Amazon via the following links:
Salt Publishing:
https://www.saltpublishing.com/collections/poetry-by-individual-poets/products/flatlands-9781844715565
Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_8?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=victor+tapner&sprefix=victor+t%2Caps%2C134
Finding Flatlands
My article 'Finding Flatlands: a journey through prehistory' on the writing of the collection was first published on the Salt website, and is also published on this site (see menu above).
Waiting to Tango: radio interview
A wide-ranging interview with me about Waiting to Tango appeared on BBC Essex. The interview starts about 3 hours 18 minutes into the programme.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03gj50m#play
'Kalashnikov' on Irish radio
A reading of 'Kalashnikov' is included in The Poetry Programme, RTE Radio 1, featuring interviews from the Cork International Poetry Festival. It was broadcast on February 13, 2016.
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/the-poetry-programme/
Interview by Sheenagh Pugh
An interview with me by the poet and novelist Sheenagh Pugh is published on her website: http://sheenaghpugh.livejournal.com/54967.html
Poem Alone
The 'Poem Alone' slot changes from time to time according to whim or weather. At the moment it's The Reforms of William Wilberforce, which was shortlisted in the Keats-Shelley Prize 2018 and was first published on the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association website.