Backalong: Winner of the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition

Backalong, a dialect word from Nia Broomhall’s native Somerset, describes any point in the past - it could be this March, last March, or 1979. True to its title, her impressive debut collection observes the distant past and recent past with the same eyes: the distant past through poems of place and origin; the recent through poems that track the process of grieving for someone who was right there, not so long ago. Through its musicality of language, Backalong searches for joy, finding what persists - and finding the words to pick out what shines, despite everything.

Nia Broomhall won the 2023 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker for her debut collection Backalong (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2024). She received an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in 2023, and is Poet in Residence at Painshill Park in Surrey for 2024, funded by an Arts Council DYCP grant. She won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize for 2023/2024, and was Highly Commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Magma, Bad Lilies, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Alchemy Spoon, The Interpreter’s House and The Friday Poem, and anthologised by Sidhe Press and Black Bough Poetry. Currently co-Head of English at a comprehensive school in Surrey, the best hour of her week is Poetry Club on a Friday afternoon. Originally from rural Somerset, she comes from a long line of West Country women who talk to strangers and embarrass their children.