Jane McKie wins Edwin Morgan poetry prize

Jane McKie's poem "Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin" has won the Edwin Morgan international poetry competition - at just 47 words long, earning her £106 per word. Inspired by a Saxon church in Arundel, McKie's poem beat more than 1,200 entries from countries across the world. Her winning poem was described by judges as "spare, musical and wonderfully imagined." McKie, who lives in Linlithgow, West Lothian, is a research fellow at the University of Stirling and runs her own small publisher, Knucker press . She is the first winner of the £5,000 Edwin Morgan prize, inaugurated in 2008, since the poet's death in 2010. Speaking after the ceremony at the Edinburgh international book festival, McKie said winning was "like a dream." "I'm overwhelmed," she said. "As a writer it's always famine and feast, you're up and down. So this has restored a bit of confidence. I was in the middle of moving house when I found out. My mother had come to live with me and we were packing boxes and I couldn't get anything done after I heard. "My five-year-old daughter said this morning that she had a dream last night that everyone in the family had won a prize of chocolate crispy cakes. Now I can buy her a hell of a lot of crispy cakes." McKie triumphed over a five-strong, all-female shortlist chosen by judges Vicki Feaver and Kona Macphee. Runners-up were Gillian Andrews, Sarah Jackson, Jane Yeh and Lydia MacPherson. Feaver was full of praise for the winning poem. "Although Jane's poem doesn't have many words, I absolutely know the hours, months and years of love and labour that goes into a poem," she said. "It really does deserve the £5,000. Spare, musical and wonderfully imagined." Kona Macphee added: "Leper Window epitomises everything I love about poetry. It revels in the musicality of language and is magnificently concise, evoking a whole lost world in a dozen elegantly understated lines." This is not the first time McKie has been honoured. Her debut collection, Morocco Rococo, won the Scottish Arts Council award for best first book of 2007. The prize, donated wholly by the University of Strathclyde, is among the biggest for poetry in the UK. Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin by Jane McKie The contagion of lepers has lifted. The low glass, where they crouched even lower, remains, but their breath, their rash, their lack has passed into the lace of shadows in the yard. Where God looked but did not touch, the lip of sandstone is purled with fissures.