The Sky Around My Father’s House: Winner of the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition

The Sky Around My Father charts the estrangement between a daughter and her charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music - where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek’s sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal and compressed lyric poems, ther sequence captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond - its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather.

Winner of the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024

Emilie Jelinek won the 2024 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker with her second pamphlet, The Sky Around My Father (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2025), following her debut, Wing Formula (Against the Grain Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Ambit, Finished Creatures, 14 magazine, Mslexia, Resurgence, Under the Radar and Ireland’s Munster Literary Review, Southword: New International Writing. She won second prize in both the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2023 and the Wells Open Poetry Prize in 2024, where she also received the Hilly Cansdale Award. She was a finalist in Mslexia’s Poetry Competition in 2023 and was highly commended in the Belfast Book Festival’s Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the McLellan Poetry Competition in 2022. She was awarded a distinction for her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2023. She grew up in Belgium and France and has spent her career working for international organisations in Russia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar and West Africa, returning to the UK in 2014. She lives in Bath with her husband, two children and a growing menagerie of animals.