Forty years on, a visceral portrait of the miners’ strike in 
Thatcher’s Britain makes the prestigious poetry shortlist
A collection of poetry alongside photographs depicting the 1984-85 miner’s strike has shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Prize Best Collection. Poet Sarah Wimbush put her words to both famous and previously unseen images from one of the 20th Century’s most desperate struggles between workers and government in Britain.
STRIKE, published by Stairwell Books, and supported by a Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors, has earned plaudits from fellow poets, playwrights, journalists and authors around the UK. Wimbush’s collection captures the turbulence of a time when miners were pitted against police, and other miners, while a marginalised community on the verge of profound change rallied to face overwhelming odds from a government intent on crushing resistance.
‘I am overwhelmed and thrilled that STRIKE has made the Forward Prize shortlist,'’ says Sarah, whose ancestors worked in the coal industry across the north of England from the 19th century onward.
Doncaster-born Sarah is no stranger to winning awards, but this collection touches an anniversary nerve for anyone who lived through these strikes.
‘2024 marks 40 years since the start of the miners’ strike, so it’s fitting that STRIKE should be honoured by being shortlisted for this prestigious poetry prize,’ said Stairwell Books managing editor Rose Drew. ‘We launched STRIKE at the National Coal Mining Museum for England in Wakefield in January and the reaction to Sarah’s astonishing words and the photographer’s powerful images was unforgettable. We are not at all surprised she has made this shortlist, and we couldn’t be more proud.’
STRIKE by Sarah Wimbush
STRIKE is a poetic response to one of the longest running and most divisive industrial disputes to ever take place in British history.
From Billy Elliot country in the North East to the spoil tips of Wales, STRIKE is a journey through human struggle.
We encounter flying pickets at Wivenhoe Docks, battling to stop imported coal, come face to face with politicised 'Women Against Pit Closures' and reel at the brutality of riot police. We discover what motivates Scargill while Thatcher's tactics are laid bare in the Ridley Plan. The BBC's reversed news footage of the Battle of Orgreave illustrates how media manipulates coverage and the infamous ballot box stands silent.
But there are moments of humanity: an impromptu game of football between Nottinghamshire police and strikers, the Pits and Perverts concert organised by 'Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners', and a Scottish policeman giving a picket the kiss of life.
By 1985, these poems ache with strike-breakers, impacted children, and tragic deaths, yet even in this most desperate of class struggles there are still flashes of humour and hope.
Launched at the National Coal Mining Museum for England in January 2024, STRIKE has prompted a pit full of plaudits:
Written as part of a collection of poems to commemorate the defining conflict of a time of division, her direct, polemical lines amount to an elegy. Whilst Wimbush’s tone is defiant – her own family background, embedded as it is in the mines, underwrites the partisan sentiment – forty years of hindsight confer irony on a cause now lost, on flattened pitheads and coal imports in a time of irreversible climate change. STEVE WHITTAKER – Literary Editor, Yorkshire Times
Sarah Wimbush’s brilliant collection comprises poems written on themes depicted in photographs captured in real-time by photo-journalists of real merit during the period, some iconic, and some never before published. The texts of the poems combine wonderfully with the images to transport the reader back to what was seen and not seen, what exposed and not exposed to the average TV viewer or listener or mainstream newspaper reader at the time. ALISTAIR FINDLAY, The Morning Star
These poems are so powerful and moving that they almost set the page alight with their anger and craft; put alongside stunning photographs they really are first drafts of a history that needs to be told. IAN McMILLAN – poet, journalist, playwright, broadcaster
Poems straight from the front line of the miners’ strike: sharp, impassioned, resonant. A genuine affinity with the people and places she writes about. Essential reading for this landmark anniversary. IAN PARKS – poet, songwriter, academic
A fierce, gripping, and tender memorial to the coal-mining communities embroiled in the 1984-85 strike, as captured by the photographers of the time, and re-imagined for us by the poet Sarah Wimbush, whose indignation ignites the page. AMY WACK – poet and editor, based in Cardiff, Wales
This moving and important book about the miners’ strike is a sustained act of attention that, through photographs and poems, captures the raw, tender texture of the recent past. A poetic archive of slogans, slang and heart-breaking details – home-perms, clubs, jumble, chips and scraps – reminds us that, defiantly: ‘Our language still exists’. CLARE POLLARD – poet, novelist, playwright, literary translator, critic
Sarah Wimbush is a Doncaster poet who lived in Leeds for 22 years. Her first collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published with Bloodaxe in 2022. She is the author of two prize-winning pamphlets: The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop, 2021) and Bloodlines (Seren, 2020). She has also placed in several single poem competitions including 1st in the Mslexia, 2nd in the Ledbury, and 3rd in the Plough. Her work has recently appeared in PN Review, the Morning Star and Poetry Wales.
Sarah’s ancestors worked in the coal industry across the north of England. On the surface they were clerks, secretaries and an area surveyor. Below ground they laboured as hewers, fillers, ostlers, pony-drivers, pumpwrights, sinkers, winders and haulage boys. In 1910, her great-grandfather moved his family from D H Lawrence country to the new Yorkshire Main to work ‘in a pit they could stand up in’. Her great-great grandfather drowned in an accident at Tinsley Park and her great uncle was killed in a roof fall at Harworth. Her grandad, a ripper, was also crushed in a roof fall at Harworth and learned to walk again at The Miners’ Rehabilitation Centre based at Firbeck Hall, which has connections to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.
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