Forward Prizes for Poetry

29/07/2026

We’re thrilled to continue our Forward Prize spotlights 2026! Our second Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Jerwood Best First Collection category: five outstanding debut collections, which each showcase a bold new voice and fresh poetic vision.

Today we turn to Shauna M. Morgan with her shortlisted collection Ground Provisions (published by Peepal Tree Press).

In her debut collection, Shauna M. Morgan takes us on a sensory journey across landscapes of the body and the earth. Immersing readers in lush language and imagery, the collection traverses the natural world from the Caribbean to North America and provokes questions about identity in the making of diasporas and the formation of multi-ethnic realities. What remains and what is created anew? Who emerges at the fissures of culture? What is learned from human relationships with the land? How do we make provisions between generations?

These poems guide us through a backabush Jamaican community to an often-hostile US environment as they interrogate power, follow the desire for freedom, explore the necessity of ancestral memory, and answer the crucial need to touch the earth and each other.

Sonnet and sestina walk alongside poetic forms such as haibun and duplex to explore family origins and Afro-Indo cultural syncretism while offering intimate views of the speakers and their interior lives. We witness grief overwhelming the mind and body, children holding painful secrets, women leaning into sensuality, and families coming to terms with fracture and reconciliation.

Through intertwined familial and historical inheritances, these poems ask us to imagine the liberatory possibilities of establishing new roots with legacy seeds.

As Shauna says: ‘This collection is a harvest. I’ve been tending to some of the poems for a very long time. Others were written more recently in cherished circles of Black, Asian, and Latiné writers. All of them feel connected to a legacy that is marked by struggle, desire for liberation, intimacy with the natural world, utterances of love, although that might not have been totally clear to me when I gathered my poems and set out to make a book. However, having a brilliant editor who understands the cultural nuances was invaluable. The poems that feel most emblematic of that inheritance are “Groundlife”, “New Provisions”, and “Water Prayer”—all of which deal with loss, the body, histories of oppression, and displacement, while simultaneously marking a sonic path of resistance and hope through a sensate world.’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-shauna-m-morgan/

And to discover more about Ground Provisions read here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/poem/ground-provisions/

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Shauna M. Morgan was born in Jamaica, West Indies and raised in the rural district of Gravel Hill and the farming community of Vernamfield in the parish of Clarendon. She is a poet, scholar, and teacher of creative writing and Africana literature at the University of Kentucky in the United States. Both her scholarly work and her poetry explore the ecosystems of multi-ethnic Black life with attention to the body, grief, identity, and freedom in the natural world.

Her poetry has appeared in A Gathering Together, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, Interviewing the Caribbean, and ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, among other periodicals and anthologies. Her critical work has been published in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, CLA Journal, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, South Atlantic Review and elsewhere. Ground Provisions, her first full collection, was shortlisted in the poetry category of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Shauna was awarded Interviewing the Caribbean’s inaugural Catherine James Palmer Poetry Prize, and she was a fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, Germany. Her chapbook, Fear of Dogs & Other Animals, was published by Central Square Press (Boston). Shauna resides in Lexington, Kentucky where she tends to a small provision ground and explores the environmental and cultural linkages between her rural Afro-Indo-Jamaican upbringing and her US-Kentucky life.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from 5th August for 🎟️ ticket information.

28/07/2026

We’re thrilled to continue our Forward Prize spotlights 2026! Our second Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Jerwood Best First Collection category: five outstanding debut collections, which each showcase a bold new voice and fresh poetic vision.

Today we turn to Roshni Gallagher with her shortlisted collection Even the Trees (published by Bloodaxe Books).

In her debut collection Roshni Gallagher asks what can be seen, named or remembered. From Scotland to Guyana, the poems explore the porous boundary between the past and the present, and how ecological landscapes and landscapes of the mind and body are permanently altered by migration and memory. The elegiac series of poems Kala Pani reflects on the history and legacy of Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean. Following the experience of women in the moment of rupture as they cross the ocean, these poems hover at the border of what is known and unknown.

Other poems navigate stories from Gallagher’s mixed heritage, from the Windrush generation to the sod houses in Ireland. She explores the tension between historical and personal silence – what can and can’t be spoken about. But stories are retained in the objects around us, from a pair of earrings made from stolen gold to a painting of a waterfall in the childhood home.

The poems look through windows, emerge from darkness, and traverse spaces ‘on the edge of things’ where land gives way to water. Seeing and being seen are often painful, yet there is beauty, healing and connection in what we choose to give our attention to.
As Roshni says: ‘To me, the most important poems in the book are the ‘Kala Pani’ sequence of poems that follow Indian indentured labourers as they cross the ocean. These poems are at the heart of the collection, and it’s where the title Even the Trees comes from. I found this sequence emotionally difficult to write, and I think that there is an ethical question when dealing with traumatic subject matter. My ancestors were indentured labourers in Guyana, yet for me it was a lost history. Growing up, I had never heard of Indenture. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I first started to research the history of South Asian people in the Caribbean. It’s hard to put into words how important it has been to me to do this research over the years, to write these historical poems, and to share them. ’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-roshni-gallagher/

And read more about Even the Trees here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/poem/even-the-trees/

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Roshni Gallagher is a poet from Leeds of mixed Indo-Guyanese and Irish heritage. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of St Andrews, and lives in Edinburgh. She was co-winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (2022) and a recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award (2022) and was joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize in 2024. Her pamphlet Bird Cherry was published by VERVE Poetry Press in 2023, and her first book-length collection, Even the Trees, is published by Bloodaxe Books in September 2026.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from 5th August for 🎟️ ticket information.

27/07/2026

We’re thrilled to continue our Forward Prize spotlights 2026! Our second Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Jerwood Best First Collection category: five outstanding debut collections, which each showcase a bold new voice and fresh poetic vision.

First up we look at Sophie Dumont with her shortlisted collection Sculling (published by Corsair (Little, Brown Book Group).

An unflinching and tenderly obsessive collection, Sculling, explores the poet’s deeply personal relationship to the River Avon, as she circles an accident that led to a terrible bereavement. Sculling is both a powerful investigation into categories of haunting and a reflection on her relationship to bodies of water, from her own body to the state of pollution in UK rivers, and is a meticulous and fiercely vulnerable debut.

As Sophie says: ‘The Bristol River Avon is a mirror I gaze into throughout Sculling and has been a constant, majestic and challenging force in my life. A couple of weeks before I handed in my final manuscript to my publisher, I visited Joyce’s Pool – a source of the River Avon. This visit felt like a necessary form of closure and renewal. Once I returned home, I wrote the collection’s final poem ‘Joyce’s Pool, January 4th’. ’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-sophie-dumont/

And follow this link to read more about Sculling: https://forwardartsfoundation.org/poem/sculling/

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Sophie Dumont is a poet, editor and copywriter based in Bristol. Her debut poetry collection, Sculling, has been featured in The Guardian, Financial Times, The Sunday Times, Bath Chronicle, Bristol Post and Somerset Live. Her poetry has won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize and the Society of Authors’ John Brooks Award, and has appeared in Magma, The Moth, Mslexia and The Rialto among others. She was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and a place on the Genesis Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers Programme. She's held writing residencies along Bristol Harbourside with Boat Poets and at Exeter Custom House with Literature Works.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from 5th August for 🎟️ ticket information.

24/07/2026

We’re delighted to continue our Forward Prize spotlights 2026! Our first Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Best Collection category: five virtuoso books which represent the very best of contemporary poetry, by ‘addressing the world head-on’ - in ways that move, challenge, and stay with you. These collections are by poets at the top of their game, responding to the world and creating indelible work that has the capacity to change the way we all move in our modern world.

Today we complete the Best Collection spotlights by turning to Caroline Smith with her shortlisted collection Bycatch (published by Nine Arches Press).

Bycatch presents a powerfully relatable narrative centred around ageing parents, caring and the care system, and the onset of dementia. Told through the prism of her own family experience, Smith has written a strikingly accessible, empathetic book of poetry that charts isolation and sorrow along with moments of revelation and joy.
Caroline says: ‘It was a challenge writing about someone so close to me. My father was a good man, yet I was not writing a eulogy, but about aging and dementia and the devastating toll it can take on families. It was essential to have space and distance between poet and the subject, to allow the poem to stand free of my own feelings. I knew the collection would only work if it resonated with others and their experience. It needed enough detail for my father to come alive as a person prior to his dementia, but not to become a personal album.’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗
https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-caroline-smith/

And read more about Bycatch here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/poem/bycatch/

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Caroline Smith trained as a sculptor at Goldsmiths College. She now lives in Wembley where she works with refugees. Her previous collection, The Immigration Handbook was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and translated into Italian. Smith is widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Poetry Review, The Spectator and Staying Alive (Bloodaxe). Her work has been shortlisted or won prizes in the Keats/Shelley, Indigo Dreams and The Alpine International poetry competitions. She has given readings at festivals and universities around the world, including Aldeburgh, Cardiff, Ledbury, Columbia and Michigan universities. Set to music by the British Argentinian composer Silvina Milstein, her poetry has been performed by the BBC Singers. She is a 2025 Hawthornden Fellow.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from early August for 🎟️ ticket information.

23/07/2026

We’re delighted to continue our Forward Prize spotlights 2026!

Our first Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Best Collection category: five virtuoso books which represent the very best of contemporary poetry, by ‘addressing the world head-on’ - in ways that move, challenge, and stay with you. These collections are by poets at the top of their game, responding to the world and creating indelible work that has the capacity to change the way we all move in our modern world.

Today we turn to Karen McCarthy Woolf with her shortlisted collection Unsafe (published by Bloomsbury Publishing UK).

A disenchanted walk through the afterlives of colonialism across London and LA, Unsafe illuminates the effects of capitalism on those who live at its sharp end. The third collection from Jhalak and T S Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet, essayist and editor is a moving, critical and fiercely intelligent epic weaving together poetry, documentary and lyric essay - and an interrogation of what it means to be a citizen and testimony to the remaining spaces we can call free.

As Karen says: ‘The book is one long poem, in a hybrid form I created called a fractured photolyric, which flattens structural hierarchies so that small, anecdotal or quotidian experience, such as the section on cats, or those detailing conversations with friends, are punctuated by photos and have as much importance as larger geopolitical themes like climate, social justice and ecology, all of which have been longstanding preoccupations.’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-karen-mccarthy-woolf-2/

And to read more about Unsafe please click here: https://forwardartsfoundation.org/poem/unsafe/

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is a poet, editor, essayist and librettist. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was a Guardian Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was the inaugural poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. In 2025, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). She lives in south London.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from early August for 🎟️ ticket information.

22/07/2026

We’re delighted to continue our Forward Prize spotlights 2026!

Our first Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Best Collection category: five virtuoso books which represent the very best of contemporary poetry, by ‘addressing the world head-on’ - in ways that move, challenge, and stay with you. These collections are by poets at the top of their game, responding to the world and creating indelible work that has the capacity to change the way we all move in our modern world.

Today we turn to Keith Jarrett with his shortlisted collection Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied (published by Bad Betty Press).

Keith Jarrett’s dazzlingly lyrical new collection asks how we process violence when it’s lionised in our language, on city street signs, in the edicts of a vengeful god. With courage, insight and mischief, these poems invite the reader to look sideways, to consider the absurd, messy and problematic with a playfulness that feels, in itself, slyly revolutionary.

As Keith says: ‘This book has been years in the making, and I think it shows stylistically: some of the poems feel similar in style and tone to my earlier published work; others are more experimental and daring, as the way I write and use space on the page has shifted. It feels like different writer-selves are in conversation with each other.’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://ow.ly/vCM650ZpXCc

And to read more about Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied please follow this link: https://ow.ly/1xQJ50ZpXCe

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Keith Jarrett is a writer and educator of Jamaican heritage. An international slam champion, he was selected for the International Literary Showcase as an outstanding LGBT writer. His poem, ‘From the Logbook’, was projected onto St. Paul’s Cathedral. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was performed at the Old Vic and aired on BBC Four. Keith’s poetry, fiction and essays have been widely anthologised. He has appeared on Benjamin Zephaniah’s BAFTA-winning show Life & Rhymes and in documentaries on Black and q***r history. Keith is a Lambda Literary and an Obsidian Fellow, and holds a PhD from Birkbeck University, where he was awarded the Bloomsbury Studentship. He lives in London, and teaches at NYU London. His collection, Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied (Bad Betty Press) is a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from early August for 🎟️ ticket information.

21/07/2026

We’re delighted to continue our Forward Prize spotlights 2026! Our first Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Best Collection category: five virtuoso books which represent the very best of contemporary poetry, by ‘addressing the world head-on’ - in ways that move, challenge, and stay with you. These collections are by poets at the top of their game, responding to the world and creating indelible work that has the capacity to change the way we all move in our modern world.

Today we turn to Sarah Howe with her shortlisted collection Foretokens (published by chatto & windus (Vintage Books).

This extraordinary new collection from TS Eliot prize-winner Sarah Howe, navigates the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism through the portrait of motherhood. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?
As Sarah says, Foretokens is ‘a book about inheritance – what trickles down to us from previous generations, and what we might not want to pass on. There are poems here I wrote for my children, which try to catalogue both the wonders I experienced when I became a mother, and the ruptures in my sense of self.’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://ow.ly/MjFi50ZpXzX

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website 🔗 https://ow.ly/2mpx50ZpXzW

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from early August for 🎟️ ticket information.

20/07/2026

We’re thrilled to introduce our Forward Prize spotlights 2026! Our first Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Best Collection category: five virtuoso books which represent the very best of contemporary poetry, by ‘addressing the world head-on’ - in ways that move, challenge, and stay with you. These collections are by poets at the top of their game, responding to the world and creating indelible work that has the capacity to change the way we all move in our modern world.

First up we look at Tishani Doshi with her shortlisted collection Egrets, While War (published by Bloodaxe Books).

The timely, powerful and sometimes playful poems in this collection from three-time Forward-prize alum explore environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of time, and the devastations of war. But as the American writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil puts it: ‘Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant'.

As Tishani says: ‘These poems are … invested in the idea of seeing, recognition, anagnorisis. We are living through an age of great unmasking, not just the shedding of our covid masks, but the complete collapse of institutions and structures that were meant to enshrine certain human ideals and values. In that sense, the comma in the book’s title works as a hinge between beauty and horror, the dichotomies of living.’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-tishani-doshi-2/

To read more about Egrets, While War please follow this link:
https://forwardartsfoundation.org/poem/egrets-while-war/

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website — link in bio.

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Her fifth collection, Egrets, While War, was published by Bloodaxe in 2026. Her fourth, A God at the Door, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2021. Her third, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, following Everything Begins Elsewhere (2012). Her debut collection Countries of the Body (Aark Arts, 2006) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also published two novels with Bloomsbury. She worked for many years with the legendary choreographer Chandralekha, performing with her on international stages. She lives near Chennai, India, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from early August for 🎟️ ticket information.

20/07/2026

We’re thrilled to introduce our Forward Prize spotlights 2026!

Our first Meet the Poet series looks at the shortlist for the Best Collection category: five virtuoso books which represent the very best of contemporary poetry, by ‘addressing the world head-on’ - in ways that move, challenge, and stay with you. These collections are by poets at the top of their game, responding to the world and creating indelible work that has the capacity to change the way we all move in our modern world.

First up we look at Tishani Doshi with her shortlisted collection Egrets, While War (published by Bloodaxe Books

The timely, powerful and sometimes playful poems in this collection from three-time Forward-prize alum explore environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of time, and the devastations of war. But as the American writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil puts it: ‘Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant'.

As Tishani says: ‘These poems are … invested in the idea of seeing, recognition, anagnorisis. We are living through an age of great unmasking, not just the shedding of our covid masks, but the complete collapse of institutions and structures that were meant to enshrine certain human ideals and values. In that sense, the comma in the book’s title works as a hinge between beauty and horror, the dichotomies of living.’

To find out more, please read the full interview here: 🔗 https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-tishani-doshi-2/

And you can find oout more about Egrets, While War here: 🔗https://forwardartsfoundation.org/poem/egrets-while-war/

You can also explore the full shortlist on our website.

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Her fifth collection, Egrets, While War, was published by Bloodaxe in 2026. Her fourth, A God at the Door, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2021. Her third, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, following Everything Begins Elsewhere (2012). Her debut collection Countries of the Body (Aark Arts, 2006) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also published two novels with Bloomsbury. She worked for many years with the legendary choreographer Chandralekha, performing with her on international stages. She lives near Chennai, India, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

SAVE THE DATE!
The Forward Prizes Ceremony 2026 will be held at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October. All shortlisted poets will perform live before the winners are revealed. To join us for a night of unforgettable poetry and celebration please check our website (or our bio) from early August for 🎟️ ticket information.

When did you start writing poetry and what drew you into it? I started writing poems seriously when I was...

16/07/2026

We want to extend a heartfelt THANK YOU to our incredible panel of judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2026 — , WN Herbert, , yomi_sode and our Chair, novelist and memoirist Sarah Moss.

This amazing panel read and listened to the work of over 500 poets, making this a truly inspiring and challenging journey. Thanks to their commitment, this year’s shortlist shines a light on diverse, powerful voices that move, challenge, and uplift.

We’re so grateful for their time and expertise in shaping a list that reflects poetry’s beauty, urgency, and relevance in today’s world.

Join us in celebrating the shortlisted poets and stay tuned for the awards ceremony on 24 October at the Southbank Centre — a night of unforgettable poetry and performance!