Wellington writer Wes Lee has been awarded third prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize in London for her poem ‘Recovery Room’, by the judges Neil Astley and Amy Wack. The First prize winner was Californian poet Dan O’Brien for ‘The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Barrel Bombs’. The second prize was awarded to UK poet Ross Cogan for ‘Aurvandil’s Toe’. The winning poems can be read here.

The annual Troubadour Poetry Prize (£5000) is one of the largest UK prizes for an individual poem. Administered by Coffee-House Poetry, this year the prize attracted over 4,000 entries from around the world.

The prize-giving evening took place on Monday night at The Troubadour in Brompton Road, Earls Court, London, where the winning poets were announced and read alongside Neil Astley and Amy Wack.

‘The Troubadour was founded in 1954 as a writers' and artists' cafe: Stanley Kubrick had his favourite table in the early '60s, & it soon became the hub of a folk-poetry-jazz-&-r'n'b revolution. And while acts as varied as Paul Simon, Joan Baez, Eric Clapton, Martin Carthy, the Stones, the Dubliners & Bob Dylan flourished in the cellar-club's bohemian setting, it was poetry that made the cluttered, eccentric & always-lively coffee-house a magnet for London's writers over the past 55 years.'

The prizewinning poems are published on the Coffee-House Poetry website.

The Troubadour Poetry Prize will reopen for submissions in the New Year.