Kelly Michels’ poetry collection American Anthem has been included on the 2025 RSL Ondaatje Prize shortlist.
This annual award of £10,000 is presented for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place.
This year’s judges are Ruth Gilligan (Chair), Charlie Craggs and Roy McFarlane.
Congratulations to all shortlisted authors:
American Anthem by Kelly Michels
Clear by Carys Davies
Night Train to Odesa by Jen Stout
No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald
Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang
The Catchers by Xan Brooks
The winner will be announced at a special event celebrating the award in May 2025.
American Anthem was also shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Arts Foundation Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection
‘After spending a week sleeping on the floor / of a crack house she comes home dragging / a heap of bones.’ So begins Kelly Michels’ sometimes shocking debut as the author remembers observing her mother. Blending lyric and narrative modes the dominant strands of American Anthem focus on the tragedies, both personal and national, of the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects of addiction and of gun violence in America where the author grew up.
Drawing on personal experience, in the books centrepiece, a tour de force addressed to the writer’s younger sister, the repeated, repercussive ‘How do I tell her?’ allows us to overhear the harrowing details of an assault by a rapist. Other poems respond to a mass shooting in her home neighbourhood.
This is an urgent, necessary book, a severe indictment of the mammoth pharmaceutical companies and of the merchants and pro-ponents of arms. Kelly Michels has heeded Robert Lowell’s injunction to ‘say what happened’ and her report is fashioned in a series of remarkable poems. American Anthem proclaims a new voice in Irish poetry. It is an outstanding, bold and brave first collection.
