Winners
The judge this year has been Maya C. Popa. Maya is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022; Picador, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Levis reading prize from VCU. Her first collection, American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry and her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack’s 2024 best-selling featured publications. The Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly, she teaches at NYU and runs Conscious Writers Collective, an online writing community.
Maya C. Popa: “Audre Lorde remarked that ‘Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.’ This is among the many profound and vital truths about poetry, that it rushes forth to dismantle a silence or otherwise render it on the page. There are just as many ways to name as there are poets to do the naming. I look forward to widening my own hearing, my own thoughts, by spending time with these poems.”
Ledbury Poetry Competition is run annually. Find out more below.
Who can enter?
- The competition is international, open to poets writing in the English language
- You must be 18 years of age or over to enter
What’s the deadline?
- The closing date is Mon 7th July 2025 at 23.59 BST
What’s the prize?
- First Prize: £1000 cash and a week’s poetry course with Arvon
Second Prize: £500
Third Prize: £250 - Winners will be invited to perform their work at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2025
How much is it to enter?
- Each entry costs £6.00
The first prize for the competition is £1,000 cash and a week’s poetry course with Arvon.
Arvon is the UK’s leading creative writing charity with a wide range of residential and online writing courses. The winner will have one calendar year from the prize being announced to claim either a residential or online week of their choice.
Competition Entry Rules/Guidelines
If you have any questions or need assistance with the competition entry process please email sabeen.chaudhry@ledburypoetry.org.uk
- You may enter up to 10 poems at any time.
- Poems must be received by Monday 7th July 2025 at 23:59 BST. Entries will not be accepted after the closing deadline.
- The length of each poem must not exceed 40 lines. (This applies to the written lines of the poem. Titles, epigraphs, line spaces between stanzas and dedications are not counted as lines.)
- You must be 18 years of age or over to enter.
- All applications must be submitted online through the entry form on this page.
- Please submit each poem as a single PDF file. Each poem must be submitted as a separate document, up to 10 documents can be attached to your application online.
- Please include the title of your poem in the poem and name your file with the title of your poem.
- The competitor’s name must NOT appear in the poems or in the document file name – names must be included on the entry form details only.
- All entries must be the original work of the entrant and should not have been previously published, broadcasted, or accepted for publication by a magazine, or have won competitions elsewhere.
- Copyright remains with the author, but Ledbury Poetry reserves the right to have entries performed at the Festival, on radio, TV, or stage, published on the internet, in an anthology or used for publicity purposes at any stage in the future.
- An automated acknowledgement of the entry will be sent (please check Spam or Junk folders if you don’t see one).
- The decision of the judge is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
- Ledbury Poetry reserves the right to withhold prizes if such an action is justified.
- Entries not complying with competition rules will be disqualified.
- Winners/runners up/highly commended entries will be notified directly once the judging has been completed and details of the winners event in 2025 will be sent in due course.
- Ledbury Poetry is a registered charity – Charity No. 1059465
Ledbury Poetry is thrilled to announce this year’s Poetry Competition Winners.
In 1st place: Mark Fiddes – Stop. Go. Orange Blossom. Mark Fiddes lives and writes in the Middle East and Spain. His most recent collection is ‘Other Saints Are Available’ (Live Canon), following ‘The Rainbow Factory’ and ‘The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre’ (both Templar Poetry). A prizewinner in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Prize among others, Mark’s poems have appeared over the past year in The Irish Times, Southword, The Madrid Review and Shearsman Magazine.
Judge’s Comments:
I immediately admired the conceit of this poem and how patiently, quietly, and precisely it was undertaken (in keeping with its subject). It was the poem I kept returning to, the one that most stayed with me as I read through the next few hundred submissions.
Stop. Go. Orange Blossom.
The tai chi seniors are out there again,
under flame trees, preventing storms
with hands upturned
saying ‘no’ to the thousand hurricanes
that seed the air about them.
They sway at the speed of seaweed
in rockpools long after tide recedes
to counter fast which is the disease
you catch from cities just by breathing,
or buying a lottery ticket.
Fast causes life to buckle at intersections,
turns pillows yellow with sweat,
makes gods of Arabica and Amazon.
Fast counts love in terabytes,
earns billions by being fast.
Orange blossoms have fallen on grass
where the tai chi seniors glide
over canyons, borders and land mines.
They stroke the nothingness
before them as if it were a cat
about to spring off through a window.
Listen how it purrs,
how its eyes refuse to meet your own.
In 2nd place: Molly Twomey – My Mother Stays With Me as She Returns from University. Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, Co. Waterford. Her debut collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She was awarded the 2023 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and an Arts Council Literature Bursary in 2024. She is working on her second collection.
Judge’s Comments:
The delicate arc of this poem stood out immediately, and its well-controlled couplets are full of fantastic images and turns of phrase. It’s a poem that rewards with every reading.
My Mother Stays With Me as She Returns to University
I format your references into APA, add a table
of contents, a cover page. I want to be
the daughter buying lemons and shallots in a sundress,
who carries a lifelong grocery bag
and a trolley token in aid of Daffodil Day,
who turns your sheet down and prepares
elderflower cordial in a glass with no clouds.
I’m the dust in the projector’s lens,
the mould in the corner like freckles drawn
with eyeliner. Yesterday, I dumped a colony
of half-drunk Fantas and hoovered
enough hair to replace the tea towel I burnt
on the gas ring. I think of your table stacked
with unsigned forms and vitamins years past
their best-before, of your red face in the steam
of a chicken curry you did not factor in the time to make,
of your arms going ninety for the permission slip,
the lunch box lid, the car key. Maybe I am
another version of you with our weaknesses
for loopy earrings and dream catchers dangling from car mirrors.
Who’d have guessed you’d go back to become
a counsellor after decades of being my warden,
my cracked oven bulb? Others need you more.
I’ve turned like a prawn from translucent to colour
In 3rd place: Alicia Rebecca Myers – Porcelain God. Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her poems and essays have appeared in places that include Best New Poets, Creative Nonfiction, FIELD, Sixth Finch, SWWIM, Frozen Sea, River Styx, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2015), was selected as winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. She has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson residency for poetry and a Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference nonfiction scholarship. Her first full-length poetry manuscript, Warble, was recently chosen by former Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg as winner of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize (Meadowlark Press) and will be published in 2025. Warble was also a finalist for both the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize and the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. Rebecca lives with her husband and ten-year-old son in upstate NY, where she helps high school seniors write their college application essays.
Judge’s Comments: The poignancy, vulnerability, and strength of this poem stayed with me. Its tone was conversational, candid, self-aware—its closing lines were the most impactful of the 1000+ poems that I read.
Porcelain God
Between the third early miscarriage and the one
that took, I found a disembodied head
of St. Anthony, the width of two fingernails
crossed for luck, on the sidewalk. I picked him up
and carried him in my change purse. When I paid
for things, I rubbed his tonsure through the fabric.
I’m not Catholic or religious, but at night
I thought of each loss as a primary
source I would never again talk to, that different
books or doors would have to open. Once,
at a noodle bar in Atlanta, I felt a quickening
in my uterus like a grim missive. I excused myself
from my friends to lock myself in the single
user bathroom, and when there wasn’t blood,
I pulled out St. Anthony and set him on the toilet
tank cover, which looked like the open tome
you sometimes see him holding in pictures, the Divine
Infant squatting on its pages, and I crouched down
on the dirty floor and put my hands together,
and I prayed to the plastic patron saint
of lost things: Please don’t let me lose this one.
I needed this ribbon of words leaving my mouth.
I stared at my reflection in the bowl water, only
a shadow. St. Anthony’s tongue had just been
touring in NYC, still in decent condition but
no longer glistening. Someone knocked tentatively
on the bathroom door. Anybody in there?
I answered with enough force for both of us to hear —
Yes —speaking it directly to my body
6 commended poems are:
Jane Wilkinson – ‘Dear Winter’
Victoria Spires – ‘Homesick for Water’
Tom Bailey – ‘When the dead come back you have to take off the grief’
Gabriel May – ‘Divine Moss’
Cameron McGill – ‘After Yves Takes me to the Doctor, I Lie in the Dark’
Theophilus Kwek – ‘The Angels’
Need inspiration? Why not check out last year’s winning entries.
Arvon
Arvon is the UK’s leading creative writing charity, founded in 1968. Arvon hosts writing courses and events in a range of genres, both in-person and online. Residential writing weeks are held in three rural writing houses in Devon, Shropshire and Yorkshire. With the opportunity to live and work with professional writers, participants transform their writing through workshops, one-to-one tutorials, time and space to write. An online programme of writing courses, masterclasses and free weekly readings also runs year-round. Grants and concessions are available to help with course fees.