The Ivan Juritz Prize, which comes with a cash prize of £1,000 for  three categories in Text, Sound, and Visual Arts, is awarded to a postgraduate students throughout Europe either from traditional academic disciplines or from creative courses. Students are invited to submit texts, films, musical compositions, virtual documentation of artwork, excerpts of moving image work and proposals for installation and performance. The prize was established in 2014 to celebrate the creative explosion of the modernist era and reward art that seeks to ‘make it new’.

Nick Makoha has been announced as  the winner of this year’s prize in the text category. Nick won for his poem A Low-Pressure System, a sequence text that explores the Entebbe hijacking in 1976.

The judging panel which included Will Eaves, Josephine Pryde, Richard Scott, and Arlene Sierra has this to say about the poem “Nick’s poems take as their starting the hostage rescue mission at Entebbe international airport in 1976. The complex geopolitics of that operation resonate in the lifelong self-fashioning of a writer with many allegiances who fled Uganda for the United Kingdom as a child but for whom the words exile and migrant are mere static views of something more essential a process of endless transformation to the person in perpetual flight.” Nick Makoha won the Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2015 and the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man in 2016. His poetry books includes  Kingdom of Gravity (2017), The Dark (2018), Resurrection Man (2016), The Second Republic (2005), and Lost Collection of Invisible Man (2005). Nick is the founder of the Obsidian Foundation.