About the winner
Sigrid is based in Brighton, East Sussex and currently enrolled on the Curtis Brown Creative Writing Course in London. She describes herself as being interested in themes of alienation, observational writing on relationships and different ways of depicting mental illness.
She is currently working on a full length narrative, ‘Chemical Lovers’, an unexpected love story between two friends, one of whom is a doctor and the other is a homeless man with mental health issues.
Brother
He’s eking out the tobacco – “How much did you bring?”.
His huge hands could crush me.
Us, siblings, grappling the Lego, the biscuits, his cap gun.
Him, chopping wood, his triceps flexing, his cut off t-shirt, London Calling.
We are in Italy.
He picks up a rabbit, legs broken by a car, wrings its neck.
Him hauling a newborn lamb out of its mother’s arse.
“Sheep are fucking stupid.” He is laconic.
Him as a baby, his long legs stretched out on the cot bed.
He is a sleeping beauty.
Legs in cricket whites, his only team.
He wakes to catch and bat.
He is Icarus at the chalk pit.
A steep drop on acid.
He is a preacher, strutting and declaiming.
His hair is a red fire.
He gets mistaken for Jesus. The muscly fight he puts up
when the paramedics want to take him to Brighton General.
Him, rolling the joints that we shared,
before he got stingy with his hash.
His thumbs, worrying the black lump.
Tobacco, all I can offer him, crumbles away.
Cool