Saboteur Spotlight: Best Anthology 2021

Congratulations on your recent win at the Saboteur Awards Festival 2021! How did you feel when you found out that you’d been shortlisted this year?

We were over the moon. It’s always really great to have your work recognised by your peers and it felt that other people agreed with us that Bloody Amazing is a fantastic book. 

Do you feel the pandemic has impacted your work at all; made it harder, or perhaps even easier, to reach people and to promote what you’re doing?

In some way it’s made it easier. From my point of view (Gill) it’s meant I’ve been able to work online with people I might not have done if not for the pandemic as well as bringing people from all over the world to the two open mic nights my partner Mark Connors and I run. It meant we could have two launch nights for Bloody Amazing and most of the contributors attended. 

Are you working on anything at the moment that you might be able to tell us a little about?

Rebecca is working on a new anthology from Beautiful Dragons called ‘Lighting Out’. She’s in Germany and we can’t wait to get together again. Gill is involved in Yaffle Press and in running online poetry workshops. Both of us are working on new collections. 

Of course, one of the real shortfalls of not being able to run a live awards show is that people miss out on the opportunity to share an acceptance speech. While you’ve got the platform to, is there anything you’d like to share with readers about your win?

We put this anthology together at the start of 2019 after feeling that the subjects of menstruation and menopause needed to be talked about and as poets we felt it was up to us to give them a voice. We were absolutely bowled over by the wonderful strong, powerful stories we received from the people who sent us their work. The book is very much a collaborative project and this win was a massive boost to all those involved, especially the two editors, Rebecca Bilkau and Gill Lambert.

A huge congratulations again to the editors and contributors alike behind Bloody Amazing, for winning in the category of Best Anthology 2021. If you’d like to know more about the book, and indeed the team behind it, you can keep up to date with them on Twitter. Gill Lambert tweets at @wendyonafriday while the Bloody Amazing handle is @amazing_bloody.

This concludes our Saboteur Awards 2021 Spotlight series! A huge thank you to everyone who has taken part in this and a congratulations again to all of the 2021 winners.