Saboteur Awards 2021: Winners!
For the second year running, the Saboteur Awards Festival had to swap to a digital format. We’ve had votes, more votes, and entire week of performances, panels and a much-needed well-being workshop to end it all. All of that leaves us with only one thing left to do…
Best Short Story Collection
Love Stories for Hectic People by Catherine McNamara
Best Spoken Word Performer
Luke Wright
Best Magazine
Magma
Best Literary Festival
StAnza Poetry Festival
Best Novella
All Our Squandered Beauty by Amanda Huggins
Best Poetry Pamphlet
The Weight of Snow by Pauline Rowe
Best Regular Spoken Word Night
Live from The Butchery (Digital)
Best Spoken Word Show
Spark by Sarah Grant
Most Innovative Publisher
Indigo Dreams
Best Reviewer of Literature
Isabel Costello
Best Collaborative Work
Forest moor or less, by Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling
Best Anthology
Bloody Amazing, poetry anthology
Thank you again to everyone who voted, who helped us to spread the word, and who helped to make the Saboteur Awards Festival 2021 a special week of celebrations.
If you didn’t make it along to the “live” events taking place throughout the week, you can still find Saboteur Awards Festival 2021 materials all over our YouTube channel, which is available here.
Due to the COVID-19 situation we had no option but to make the Saboteur Awards Festival 2021 a digital event. To add to that, we also decided not to apply for funding this year. With so many artists and organisations in need, it didn’t feel quite right to be potentially taking funding away from someone who may need it more. After making that decision, we then decided to put out an open call for people who might lend their time and skills to the festival to create something more community based. We asked that artists and organisations whose work had been impacted by the pandemic contact us, to arrange for a possible event or spotlight. With that in mind, our sincere thanks are owed to the following people and organisations for their time, words and all round kindness:
- Fly on the Wall Press, Stairwell Books, Selcouth Station and Jack McGowan from the University of Worcester for their work on the indie press panel (available here)
- Drunk Muse Poetry, for having a sit-down chat with Charley before the festival even started (available here)
- Rose Condo, for sharing her revised version of The Empathy Experiment and for joining us twice over to share her Saturday morning workshop, Have A (Kind) Word With Yourself
- The Mum Poem Press, for sharing their excellent anthology with us and for allowing us to provide a platform for their official launch (available here)
- To the Carcarnet poets, Katherine Horrex, Joey Connolly, Mina Gorji and Victoria Kennefick, for their time and words
- To all of the Hedgehog Poetry Press readers, Damien Donnelly, Brian McManus, Karen Mooney, Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe, Nigel Kent, Peter Kelly, who read from their recent and upcoming publications (all of which are available on our YouTube channel here)
- To Rishi Dastidar for doing an entire read-through of Saffron Jack, which is a world exclusive might we add (available here)
A completely free festival was made possible because of the kindness of those listed above. A further thanks is owed, too, to the Sabotage Reviews team who work relentlessly throughout the year, well beyond festival times, to keep the website going.
Watch out on our social media feeds and the website proper from May 26th*, for the start of our spotlight series that will be launched to celebrate our winners!
*Please note: In the interest of not pressing our winners for their spotlight responses too soon, the original timeline has been pushed back a week from what was originally planned. The relevant webpage, available here, has been altered to reflect the revised dates.
If you’d like to contribute to the running of Sabotage Reviews, you can make a quick and easy donation to the organisation via PayPal, although you are under no obligation to do so:
