Claire Askew is the winner of the 2010 Virginia Warbey Poetry Prize.

"Claire Askew's verse can be enjoyed for its playfulness and sharp wit. More rarely, it can also be treasured for its sureness of voice, its rich linguistic texture and deep emotional core. Rooted in the everyday, Askew has an ability to make the ordinary startling. Often funny, frequently startling in her imagery, she is adept at giving us the surprises, anxieties and estrangements of the modern world. But a series of poems about grandparents, of vividly rendered domestic interiors and Northern landscapes, also haunt with their poignant sense of belonging and loss. The Mermaid and the Sailors offers a procession of poems that have been honed with precision and skill, but which are effortlessly entertaining, echoing in the mind long after one has read them. This generous debut pamphlet confirms that Claire Askew is one of the most distinctive young poets to emerge in Britain in recent years."
Alan Gillis

"Askew's debut pamphlet displays great assurance. Her poems impact immediately, offering brief yet memorable vignettes of quiet lives and moments... one senses a major talent emergent in The Mermaid and the Sailors."
Robert Alan Jamieson

"These finely tuned poems, studded with arresting and memorable images, often resonate with loss and longing, absences and distances, yet many are shot through with a wry and sometimes very dark humour which unsettles even as it delights. People's inner lives come alive in these poised and telling narratives. Claire Askew is a fresh and highly distinctive new voice."
Brian McCabe

"Claire Askew is a young poet at once cosmopolitan and distinctively northern, with a fine ear for the aptly-placed colloquialism, the unusual word. A skilful and understated user of form, she is at times painterly, at other times joyously musical... The Mermaid and the Sailors is a welcome first publication from a sparky new writer."
Kona Macphee