Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard (born 1988) is a British writer, artist, film programmer, and activist from London, UK. Bernard has been a programmer at BFI Flare since 2014 and co-editor of Oxford Poetry, and their fiction, non-fiction, and art has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers.

Career Bernard was named a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005. Bernard was selected for The Complete Works programme in 2014.

Bernard's pamphlet The Red and Yellow Nothing was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2016. The collection tells the story of Sir Morien, a black knight at Camelot. The reviewer for The London Magazine wrote: "Jay Bernard has created a rare and beautiful thing. Part contemporary verse drama, part mythic retelling ... Employing metrical ballads and concrete poems with equal vigour, Bernard takes us on a visual and allusive journey to test the imagination, thus putting the poet's resources of sight and sound to full use ... reading The Red and Yellow Nothing brings continuous surprise."

Bernard won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their multimedia performance work Surge: Side A, that includes the film Something Said, inspired by the 1981 New Cross house fire and archives held at the George Padmore Institute, where they were the first poet-in-residence. The 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, and Twilight City, a film produced by Reece Auguiste for the Black Audio Film Collective in 1989, also inspired the work.

Bernard was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Bernard's poetry collection Surge, published by Chatto & Windus, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2019, for the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry, for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje Prize. It won the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

Personal life Bernard grew up in London, Bernard identifies as "black, queer", and uses the pronouns they/them.

Awards, honors

Literary awards Year Book Award Category ResultRef 2005 — Foyle Young Poets of the Year — 2016 The Red and Yellow Nothing Ted Hughes Award — 2017 Surge: Side A Ted Hughes Award — 2019 Surge Costa Book Award Poetry T. S. Eliot Prize — 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize — Ondaatje Prize — Polari PrizePolari First Book Prize Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award —

Residencies 2010: artist in residence at StAnza Poetry Festival. 2012: fellow at the National University of Singapore, and curated a graphic arts and poetry exhibition I SEE YOU at The Arts House. 2013: CityRead resident at the London Metropolitan Archives.

Filmography

Films Something Said — screened at Encounters Festival (2017), CinemAfrica (2018), BFI Flare (2018).

Biblio

Pamphlets and single-author collections

Pamphlet. Pamphlet. Pamphlet.

Performances

Surge: Side A (2017), a multimedia performance piece that won the Ted Hughes Award for new poetry. The work was performed at the Roundhouse, London, during The Last Word Festival 2017, and was produced by Speaking Volumes.

Inclusion in anthologies and collections Graphic art and poetry by Bernard appears in the following collections:

City State (2009) "Black Britain: Beyond Definition", Wasafiri, Issue 64, Winter 2010. The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt 2011) Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe 2014)

Further work and collaborations 2022: After Work, made in collaboration with Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers focuses on the building of a children's playground, which Condorelli was commissioned to create in South London.