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The Plaza Poetry Prize (60 lines max) Winners

The Plaza Poetry Prize (60 lines max) Winners

Winners

All comments listed below are from from our Pulitzer Prizewinning judge, Natalie Diaz.

Reading the finalist poems for the Plaza Prize was like shining a bright light into my end of winter days. Many of the poems were pulsing and rippling with emotional imagery and powerful ruminations on what it means to be alongside one another in this world, as miraculous beings, despite our wounds and losses. Poetry is a place that can hold what is often seen as incongruent or what we might otherwise fumble or be felled by in our unreasonable world, and I felt I was also held while reading these poems, many of which I will carry with me in the cave behind the cave behind my heart as I make my own way through my hours and days. Gracias for this gift of reading alongside your community of poets and language makers. Let’s all continue to dream strong.

1st: (£4000) ‘Loneliness Was Part Of It’ by Jaye Krantz (AUS)

The images in this poem are strange and sensual. Setting loneliness beside the buffalo, a beautiful wild beast who the US government slaughtered in mass in order to help slaughter the Natives who were bound to and by them to the land, and then washing us all in night and its “deepest-dye,” builds a cosmological and past-future narrative of the ways we living being are of consequence to one another. Loneliness and buffalo, and speaker. One is made like the other and yet is also an argument against the other, which helps us abandon the impossibility of precise language to name emotional and existential stakes of being alongside one another in the world and generously pushes us toward the precipice of story and image in “feeling.” The poet gifts us with a speaker and a buffalo, real or imagined, and the nature of holding these two beings in periphery of one another’s isolation, desolation, alonenesses, is what offers us a relationality in which we can find our way to our own wonder-filled lives. Such a beautiful poem that I’ll carry with me, like a chorus I need, reminding me I am not “just one animal.”

2nd: (£300) ‘Moth Hour’ by Wes Lee (ENG/NZ)

This poem outgrows its use of the simile early, which is a testament to the power of its strangeness and the poet’s confidence to delve into the sensual-beyond of language and image. The italicized passages and their dark, almost-dangerous mystery, which are woven in and out of the building momentums of both the staccato and longer lines, create a new temporal-spatial experience in the poem, the faltering or fading hour, or the ways our minds, our hearts, and perspectives shift in our weary or wondrous moments alike. While the poem’s early note directs us toward a narrative or a character, it’s as if the poem is happening across many times, a polyphonic constellation of presences and stories that flicker in and out. Reading this poem was a shadowy yet joyful experience and encounter with the multiplicity and simultaneity of lives and energies that I don’t need to have explained to me in order to be changed by having traveled the poem alongside them (even if the poet intended this to be a poem spoken by one singular voice).

3rd: ‘November’ (£100) by Wes Lee (ENG/NZ)

“November” is such a tender and grief-ful love poem. I am struck by the way the weight of loss creates a slowness in the poem itself, moving us not carefully but with the intentionality that comes with the emotional and physical labor it requires to move through an hour, an evening, a life, in which a beloved whom we have been a literal part of, genetically, perhaps in mannerisms, gestures, even looks, leaves us, and what that means of who are in remainder of them, and how we become the next version of ourselves, not without them per se, but with their absence as our new companion. I am grateful for this portal that helps me view grief as a sensuality as well, that gives me new vision of myself and of others, and the many ways we are alone and together, and how or lives are in constellation with our beloveds and our strangers.

4th (Highly Commended): ‘Orchard Country’ by Gram Joel Davies (WALES)

There are many beautiful and surprising moments of non-human animal and human encounter in this poem. The natural world catalyzes the speaker into a deep and sometimes dark and other times bright well of memory and wonder at beingness—to be of someone, shaped by some beloved ancestor or parent or mentor who came before us and yet are woven thoroughly into us, there absence having become their ever-presence in us. A few examples of how this reciprocity between human and non-human world make up our relationality and purpose to this world: “I’m calling, / calling into the night where a fox / screams… remember: my father’s / guitar,” or “to the stack of felled trunks, / a silver wetland showed infinity’s / plane. He spoke to me…” What a gift to feel so rooted in the land and in place that you find your ghosts and yourself there, in the vast and wild lands that make a people, a community, a home, to have such a connection to one’s land that you might always arrive to it and return to it, a land in which we will never be lonely even when we walk it alone.

Shortlisted (Top 10)

‘Vesperum’ by Scott-Patrick Mitchell (AUS)

This poem is an imagistic adventure into a cosmology and ontology in which water is a center of our existence, in story and imagination, in migration and place-making, in the ways we experience our human and non-human relationships. Such striking and surprising language and scenes. The gift of having such a relative as immense as the ocean, to help us be called to experience this unreasonably beautiful world and also to bear the burdens of our love for it and the lives we lead upon it, even as they flicker into their next world.

‘Empty Glove’ by Christoffer Wahlberg (HOL)

Disguised as a poem defined by the scars a lost love has left on the heart and mind, another complexity unfolds through lists of strikingly particular images which catalogue a series of impactful moments of change that the speaker has endured in their life and which seem to also amount to certain absences and scars. From pandemic to technological, these life changes have disrupted and discomfited the speaker, including the overwhelm of visiting or moving to an unfamiliar city—the whelm of which perhaps contributed to the dissolution of the early love. The speaker arrives to the end of the poem suddenly in need of another change, a change as big as those chronicled throughout the poem, in order to, conversely, offer relief from a repetitive stasis being suffered.

‘Self-Portrait as Water’ by Esther Lay (USA/ENG)

The poem begins tongue-in-cheek, with a flicker of humor, but then finds its curiosity and wonder—water, and how it is immense and mysterious and yet able to be cupped in our hands. The poem rushes in and out of the language of sea and water, creating currents of awe through imagery. There are fathoms of self yet to be unlocked in the big waters of this poem.

‘Wool Man’ by John Kefala Kerr (ENG)

This poem is a whimsical foray into a skillset we hone in childhood and yet never abandon, the art of imagining ourselves as superheroes. One would think that every super power would need to be a backflip of imagination or at least a constellation of high-tech and hard to find accessories, but this poem reminds us the power of the mundane and how we can find wonder in our everyday abilities and even in our everyday impossibilities.

‘The Art Party’ by CP Nield (ENG)

The note which opens the poem serves as a thesis or explanation that the poem either rises to or that the reader is not trusted to arrive at. The body of the poem is adorned in what we have been told is kitsch or a party or a critique of art. The true mystery is the you, or perhaps the I—what kitsch might make possible or what it is hiding of their true curiosities. What is at stake for them in their revelry of shade and complaint, a revelry through which they consume not only their cups overfloweth but even the people around them? And who might each be, changed or unchanged, the morning after the party?

‘Sending the Route’ by Leonardo Chung (USA)

This poem becomes a visual score of movement and gesture, making a metaphor of the climb. And yet also making a kind of image-song of body and the imagination the we are so lucky to both incite and be inspired by as we enact our bodies in such miraculous acts of focus and physicality.

Long-listed (Top 20)

‘Ricecode’ by Leonardo Chung (USA)

‘Brief Introductory Lecture on the History of Medicine’ by Stephen McCarthy (IRE)

‘Biscuit Baby’ by Andy Craven (ENG)

‘Things I Realised On a Monday Morning’ Jemima Roberts (WALES)

‘Confirmation’ by Jose Buera (DOM REP)

‘Inas’ by Charlie Newnham (ENG)

‘To the man with the family-sized trolley’ by Kate Fenwick (ENG)

‘Assimilation’ by Richard Fox (USA)

‘Ars Poetica In Blue’ by Chanice Cruz (USA)

‘Drowning On a Stranger’s Couch’ by Rhian Elizabeth (WALES)

Big congrats to our Top 3 Winners, and those extremely talented poets who made the top 10! Their poems will be published in The Plaza Prizes Anthology 3 in Oct 2025.

If you didn’t win this time – try again. The Plaza Poetry Prize (40 lines max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: George Szirtes. 1st prize: £1,000 / $1250. Deadline: 31st May, 2025. 

The Plaza Poetry Prize (60 lines max) Shortlist

Shortlist
(titles listed in no particular order)

Top 10

‘Sending the Route’

‘November’

‘Vesperum’

‘Empty Glove’

‘The Art Party’

‘Self-Portrait as Water’

‘Loneliness was part of it’

‘Wool Man’

‘Orchard Country’

‘Moth Hour’

Congrats to those poets who made the top 10! We have amended the shortlist in line with our new rule this year – no previous winners of any Plaza Poetry Prize (20/40/60lines / Prose Poetry) are eligible to enter. Two entries have been removed. Apologies for this oversight.

Our 4 winners will be posted next Tuesday 22nd April 2025.

Please note: we do not publish names until the judging process is fully complete. We’ll publish names with the final results, the winners, short-listed, long-listed. (We publish your name because you asked us to.)

The Plaza Poetry Prize (40 lines max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: George Szirtes. 1st prize: £1,000 / $1250. Deadline: 31st May, 2025. 

The Plaza Poetry Prize (60 lines max) Long List

Long List
(titles listed in no particular order)

Top 20

‘Ricecode’

‘Sending the Route’

‘Brief Introductory Lecture on the History of Medicine’

‘Biscuit Baby’

‘Things I realised on a Monday morning’

‘Confirmation’

‘Inas’

‘To the Man with the family-sized trolley’

‘Vesperum’

‘Empty Glove’

‘Assimilation’

‘Ars Poetica in Blue’

‘Drowning on a Stranger’s Couch’

‘Self-Portrait as Water’

‘Loneliness was part of it’

‘Wool Man’

‘Orchard Country’

‘Moth Hour’

‘November’

‘The Art Party’

There were 728 entries, including FREE ENTRY bursaries.

Congrats to all those 20 poets on our long list.

Since posting last week, we have had to amend the long list in line with our rules, removing two entries, and listing two others, because a new rule this year states that previous winners of the Plaza Poetry Prizes (20/40/60 lines / Prose Poetry) are not eligible to enter. We apologise for this oversight.

The amended shortlist was posted on Tuesday 15th April 2025.

Please note: we do not publish names until the judging process is fully complete. We’ll publish names with the final results, the winners, short-listed, long-listed. (We publish your name because you asked us to.)

The Plaza Poetry Prize (40 lines max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: George Szirtes. 1st prize: £1,000 / $1250. Deadline: 31st May, 2025. 

THE PLAZA AUDIO STORY PRIZE

The Plaza Audio Story Prize

This was a new contest, exciting, right on the cutting edge, we thought. Unfortunately, we only received 7 entries, as of 22nd Feb. We are exercising the right, under the rules, we reserve to cancel contests in such circumstances.

Sorry. We will refund those 7 who entered the prize. We know that will be disappointing. It’s very disappointing for us too. With a Pulitzer prize-winning judge like Junot Diaz, we had high hope there would be more interest in audio stories. Maybe we were too far ahead of the curve…?

The Plaza Short Story Prize (2500 words) Winners

Winners
(Top 4)

1st place: ‘Just the Way I Like It’ by Alan Sincic (USA)

An arrogant elderly narrator – The Writer, writ large – breaks the fourth wall to explain his superior position to the Reader. Entitled, fastidious, and wholly misanthropic, this Writer is drunk on his ability to wield words like weapons. He speaks as if from outside of time and space itself, in sentences that border on poetry. The irony, of course, is that while he looks down upon “you, dear reader, cast into outer darkness with the creaky bedsprings and the busted AC and the buzz-bomb mosquito ping-pinging at the ear,” we see his utter dependence upon those he derides. No words without readers and printers and book-binders; no life without the waiter there to “gather up all the flammables – my cap, my coat, my teeth, my hair” – and push his wheelchair into the sunlight. A voice reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, this is a strange and beautifully compressed piece of prose poetry.

2nd place: ‘Flicker’ by Tim Byrne (AUS)

Initially, this formally-daring piece reads as a series of factual essays about classic films. But it quickly takes a turn into the experimental realm, and from there into sci-fi. I haven’t read anything like it before, and found myself wanting to watch, or re-watch, many of the films mentioned. A paean to the golden era of film, and a prophetic warning in our age of streaming and A.I. generated content.

3rd place DISQUALIFIED: ’37-Year-Old Father of 3 Seeks Breakup Song Suggestions’ by E.M. Dasche / Joshua Beggs (USA)

3rd place: ‘How to Survive as a Monitor Lizard in Kota Kinabalu’ by Omar Musa (AUS)

Who knew that a monitor lizard – or “biawak,” in Malay – could be so charming? This one lives in a trash-filled drainage ditch in Kota Kinabalu. He explains how he has been able to survive, despite the fact that his skin is a valuable commodity; later, he attempts to befriend and help a young man who is on-the-run. I shudder when confronted with large reptiles – iguanas in Mexico, gila monsters in my native Arizona – but after reading this piece, with its beautiful rendering of place, I may never look at a reptile in quite the same way. A delicate depiction of the tenuous connection between the human and animal worlds.

Highly Commended: ‘I Watch Whales Fall’ by Michael Pearson (ENG)

Short list

Bricklaying by David Joseph

After all, it’s not brain surgery by David Joseph

And Only I Return by Michael Pearson

Keep it in the family by Katalin Abrudan

Tree Stump by Michael Pearson

Long list

The Rise and Fall of William the Conqueror by Sukie Shinn

A Noisy Palette by Conor Montague

Dancing With Tigers by Jo Cora

Snake in the Grass by BV Lawson

No Place Like Home by Jaime Gill

Claimed by Dorey Anderson

Mausoleum by Julie Evans

Times Up by Sherry Cassells

The Opposite of Godot by Guy Ware

The Vape Lord by Omar Musa

Congrats to our Top 4. The winners of the £1000 1st prize, £300 2nd prize, and £100 3rd prize, will be presented with their prizes at our awards ceremony in the Dordogne, France in mid-October, 2025.

The Plaza Short Story Prize (5000 words max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: Booker Prize-winner, Damon Galgut. 1st prize: £4,000 / $5000. Deadline: 30th April 2025. 

The Plaza Short Story Prize (2500 words) Long list (with names)

Long List
(titles listed in no particular order)

Top 20

Bricklaying by David Joseph

After all, it’s not brain surgery by David Joseph

Just the way I like it by Alan Sincic

I Watch Whales Fall by Michael Pearson

And Only I Return by Michael Pearson

Flicker by Tim Byrne

Keep it in the family by Katalin Abrudan

How to Survive a Monitor Lizard in Kota Kinabalu by Omar Musa

Tree Stump by Michael Pearson

37 Year Old Father of 3 seeks break-up songs by EM Dasche

The Rise and Fall of William the Conqueror by Sukie Shinn

A Noisy Palette by Conor Montague

Dancing With Tigers by Jo Cora

Snake in the Grass by BV Lawson

No Place Like Home by Jaime Gill

Claimed by Dorey Anderson

Mausoleum by Julie Evans

Times Up by Sherry Cassells

The Opposite of Godot by Guy Ware

The Vape Lord by Omar Musa

Congrats to all those 20 named writers on our longlist. The named shortlist has just been posted. The Winner of the £1000 1st prize, and 2nd, 3rd, and a Highly Commended will be posted this Friday, 31st Jan, 2025.

The Plaza Short Story Prize (5000 words max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: Booker Prize-winner, Damon Galgut. 1st prize: £4,000 / $5000. Deadline: 30th April 2025. 

The Plaza Short Story Prize (2500 words) Shortlist

Short List
(titles listed in no particular order)

Top 10

Bricklaying by David Joseph

After all, it’s not brain surgery by David Joseph

Just the way I like it by Alan Sincic

I Watch Whales Fall by Michael Pearson

And Only I Return by Michael Pearson

Flicker by Tim Byrne

Keep it in the family by Katalin Abrudan

How to Survive a Monitor Lizard in Kota Kinabalu by Omar Musa

Tree Stump by Michael Pearson

37 Year Old Father of 3 seeks break-up songs by EM Dasche

Congrats to all those 10 writers on our shortlist. The Winner of the £1000 1st prize, and 2nd, 3rd, and a Highly Commended will be posted this Friday, 31st Jan, 2025.

The Plaza Short Story Prize (5000 words max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: Booker Prize-winner, Damon Galgut. 1st prize: £4,000 / $5000. Deadline: 30th April 2025. 

The Plaza Poetry Prize (20 lines max) Winners

Winners
(listed in descending order)

All comments are from our judge, Lachlan McKinnon.

1st place: ‘I Didn’t Want This Crop’ by Martina Kontos (AUS)

‘This is a very moving poem of observation and suppressed anger (the violent verbs and actions) and expressive irony (”covering// for the covered”). It stays with the reader, thanks largely to its apparent equanimity.’

2nd place: ‘Party Animals’ by Ursula Kelly (ESP)

‘This is a wonderfully enjoyable poem, ending with the promise of either itself or something more. The alliteration is engaging and the play on “unfair dismissal” funny. The enjambement at the start of the second paragraph, after “the”, is awkward, and might come better after “driver”, although that could mean a little adjustment later. Just a small point.’

3rd place: ‘All through the Night’ by Pratibha Castle (ENG)

‘This is vividly described, the child alongside life as an observer. Although I was enjoying the poem, I felt the last “potholed by moths” fell flat. “Potholed” isn’t the right verb, I think. But the experience was powerfully conveyed by other particular details. I liked the multiplicity of meaningful things.’

4th place (Highly Commended): ‘A Priest Travels to See Her Spiritual Director’ by Esther Lay (ENG)

‘This felt almost like two poems. The second began with “I looked for him” and ended with “the quiet house”. The surrounding eight lines seemed to belong to a very different and more interesting poem The details in the middle weighed it down, as the “thing” (singular) became  a habit, a hood, a chirp, a throw, an altar, a stone and a plastic case. The four lines beginning “I wondered” were the most living in this central part, and suggested another, clearer poem. Lots of promise of better.’

5th place: ‘Par Avion’ by Jose Buera (DOM REP)

‘I liked the way an airmail letter is made physically present. I couldn’t understand “proscribed” in context, though, and “collated calluses” also gave me pause. There is no doubt a poem here, but it needs to come a little closer, a little more clearly, to reach its reader.’

6th place: “The Cure of Souls” by Esther Lay (ENG)

‘This is a good poem on a rare subject. I felt  I couldn’t see the old woman very clearly, though, “and “generous” didn’t really take me very far. The two doors are effective, though, and I enjoyed the gradual abstraction of the last stanza. It conveys the nature of a priest’s working life interestingly and engagingly.’

7th place: ‘Metta’ by Elaine Desmond (IRE)

‘Once Google had told me that “Dzogchen Beara” is not an East or Central European poet but a Buddhist centre, the poem made more sense. “Borrow” may not be right, though—here, it reads as “take on”. At the end, is “blue” meant to convey “sad”? It’s a far reach. The feelings were sympathetic and clear, but the expression needed honing.’

8th place: ‘Searching for the Source of the Moneycarragh River’ by Ursula Kelly (ESP)

‘Means of transport seem unclear. Is “she” a school coach-driver? Otherwise, why can they choose their speed in reaching the bus? “Coexistent” and “temporal” are a bit pompous in context, and “immediate lure” a bit wordy. However, it conveyed some of the delight of being young in an imaginable setting, which was pleasing.’

9th place: “And I will sew my heart shut” by Saffron Mortimer-Laing (ENG)

‘The general sense is clear, the “sponge” seemed rather grotesque or improbable… Crabs that fall between human toes are in my experience rare.’

10th place: “The Weather at Sycamore Gap” by Alison Carter (ENG)

‘I liked the last two stanzas very much.  The earlier ones feel overwrought and could be reduced to something much simpler, clearer. Is the title right? The line beginning “The sky is grey” does more than all it follows. Sometimes one must trust simplicity to do the work.’

Longlist 

(in no particular order)

‘An emigrant finds a line of pine processing caterpillars’ by Julie Sheridan (ESP/SCO)

‘Before Long’ by Sharon Black (FRA)

‘Hatchling’ by Marian Fielding (ENG)

‘Seeing in the Dark’ by Paul McMahon (IRE)

‘Tracking Tiger’ by Paul McMahon (IRE)

‘Biopsy (long after)’ by Andrew Chen (ENG)

‘What the Seals Sang’ by Iain McClure (ENG)

‘My Daughter’s Sleeping Nose’ by Gemma Strang (ENG)

‘Long Song II’ by Esther Lay (ENG)

‘Crows Landing’ by Ursula Kelly (ESP)

Congrats to our 4 winners. Thanks to Lachlan for his feedback. If you haven’t read his poetry before – I’d really recommend The Missing Months (Faber & Faber, 2022).

Well done indeed to those who placed on the long- and short- lists! I hope this credit brings you much good fortune.

I’m sorry about the delay in posting the winners before Christmas. My son’s had to have an emergency appendectomy, and well, everything else had to go on the back burner. Happy New Year to you all!

The Plaza Poetry Prize (60 lines max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: Natalie Diaz. 1st prize: £4,000 / $5000. Deadline: 28th February 2025. 

The Plaza Poetry Prize (20 lines max) Shortlist

Shortlist
(titles listed in no particular order)

Top 10

‘A Priest Travels to See Her Spiritual Director’

‘The Cure of Souls’

‘All Through the Night’

‘And I will sew my heart shut’

‘I Didn’t Want This Crop’

‘Metta’

‘Searching For the Source of the Moneycarragh River’

‘Party Animals’

‘The Weather at Sycamore Gap’

‘Par Avion’

Congrats to all those 10 poets on our long list. The winners, with comments from Lachlan, will be posted next week.

Please note: we do not publish names with titles until the judging process is complete. When it is – we’ll publish names with the final results; winners, short-listed, long-listed. We publish your name because you asked us to.

The Plaza Poetry Prize (60 lines max) is OPEN now to enter. Judge: Natalie Diaz. 1st prize: £4,000 / $5000. Deadline: 28th February 2025. 

EXTENDED DEADLINE, MIDNIGHT, NEW YEAR’S EVE, 2024.

ENTER NOW! Jamie Quatro, American novelist and short story writer, is our judge for The Plaza Short Story Prize (2500 words max).

Jamie Quatro was born in 1972 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Quatro earned her MFA from Bennington College.

Her debut collection, I Want to Show You More (2013), was widely acclaimed for its daring exploration of infidelity and spiritual yearning. The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

In 2018, Quatro released her first novel, Fire Sermon, which follows a woman grappling with a passionate extramarital affair while questioning the role of faith and desire in her life. Her latest novel is Two-Step Devil. It will be released in October 2024. Praise for the novel:-

“Just as the Prophet makes art out of detritus, Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter into transcendent beauty . . . Quatro writes with the musicality and command of a mystic poet. Her sentences are also propulsive; the novel is a page-turner that leaves readers feeling deeply invested in the fates of the Prophet and Michael, individually and together . . . Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple, Two-Step Devil is a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry. Like her forebears, Quatro wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world.” New York Times

Two-Step Devil is in part an unusual father-daughter story, as Ms. Quatro embroiders a fragile and very sweet relationship between the outcasts . . . Intimately evoked . . . Ms. Quatro is a rare novelist for whom a religious belief in good and evil is not merely a plot device but a genuine guide to describing reality.”Wall Street Journal

“In Jamie Quatro’s fiction, a person is a burning thing: a voracious creature, hot with emotional, sexual and spiritual needs; prey to the squalid demands of embodied existence…I can’t shake the sense that the pages feel warm to the touch. I see, in my mind’s eye, her sentences threaded with muscle and sinew, letters glistening with sweat and blood . . . Across Quatro’s oeuvre, there is no forgetting that selfhood is material: pulp and tissue and cuts . . . If Quatro has written a song for the frail fleshsack, she has, too, intimated humanity’s cowardice in storytelling, the entwined ‘horrific and beautiful’ realities we balk at, and in desperate self-preservation, refuse to witness.”Washington Post

Jamie is a fantastic writer, and is represented by arguably the best literary agent in the business, either side of the Atlantic, Anna Stein at CAA. For more details, and a picture of a sheep with red horns please go to: https://jamiequatro.com/tsd

EXTENDED DEADLINE. The Plaza Short Story Prize (2500 words max). Judge: Jamie Quatro. 1st Prize: £1000 ($1250). Deadline: 31st December 2024. 

Girl in a jacket

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