Writer and poet Luke Allan (b. 1987, Newcastle, England) is awarded the Ivan Juritz Prize for Text to develop his work ‘Death to Books’. Which mixes lyrical memoir, literary theory, and speculative metaphysics. The essay is made of prose fragments that build into a constellation, recalling similar stylistic experiments by Blaise Pascal, Theodor Adorno and, more recently, Maggie Nelson. The ‘death’ of the title is twofold: on the one hand, the piece memorialises a parent lost to suicide; on the other hand, it describes the author’s experience of losing reading, of falling out of love with books. The essay sets out to understand the relationship between these two ‘deaths’, though its real subjects may be the distractions and lifelines on which the text depends in order to carry on.

Luke Allan is Editor-in-chief of Oxford Poetry. Born and raised in rural Northumberland, his poetry and non-fiction have received the Charles Causley Prize, the Mairtín Crawford Award, and the Westerly Life Writing Prize, and have been shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize and the National Poetry Competition. His work is published in the TLS, the Literary Review, and Poetry. A chapbook, Sweet Dreams, the Sea, was published by the Poetry Society of America in 2025, introduced by Ishion Hutchinson. He studied creative writing at UEA and Oxford, and book arts at the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. He is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, researching poetry and typography.

Artist website: lukeallan.com