Ledbury Poetry Competition 2025 was judged by Neil Astley.
Neil is the editor of Bloodaxe Books which he founded in 1978. His books include many anthologies, most notably those in the Staying Alive series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020), along with four collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food (2007) and Soul Feast (2024), and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, and has published two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, as well as two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World. He has published some of the most significant poets of our time, including Simon Armitage, Imtiaz Dharker, Jo Shapcott, and George Szirtes.
He was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books in 1995; is a patron and past trustee of Ledbury Poetry Festival; and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. He lives in the Tarset valley in Northumberland.
The next Ledbury Poetry Competition will open for entries in Spring 2026. Find out more about entering 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 2026 closing date is tbc.
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.
How much is it to enter?
- Each poem entered 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 the deadline, (tbc). 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 and highly commended entries will be notified directly once the judging has been completed and details of the winners event in 2026 will be sent in due course.
- Ledbury Poetry is a registered charity – Charity No. 1059465
The 2025 Ledbury Poetry Competition winners are:
In 1st place: Jonathan Edwards – I am thinking of my mother.
Jonathan Edwards lives in Crosskeys, South Wales. His first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Prize and his second, Gen (Seren, 2018), received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. He previously received first prize in the Ledbury Poetry Festival competition in 2014, and through the festival’s connection with the Versopolis project, he has read at festivals in Genoa and Gdansk. His poems have recently received prizes in the Troubadour, Magma, Frogmore and Guernsey competitions, and appeared in Poetry London and Under the Radar.
Judge’s Comments:
This poem will speak to anyone who has lost a family member to cancer and is all the more moving for the way the poet keeps the sister’s memory alive, first through telling how the mother responded by speaking of their loss everywhere to anyone who would listen to her; then by how the father dealt with it in the only way he could, by silently supporting the mother. Like the father, the poet wasn’t able to talk about the sister’s loss with their parents but now does so through this poem, brilliantly switching its focus from the mother to the father and then to all three by invoking the magical image of the Cauldron of Rebirth in The Mabinogion by which the dead can be resurrected.
In 2nd place: Michael Martin – Doorman at a Club in SoHo.
Michael Martin is a prizewinning poet, editor and filmmaker. Recent poems can be found in Ploughshares, Epoch, Poetry International, The London Magazine and Poetry Ireland. He’s been a recipient of a Magma Judge’s Prize, a recent finalist for both RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, and Poetry International’s Cavafy Poetry Prize, as well as a recipient of an Edgeworth Prize for Poetry. He is the author of the poetry collection Extended Remark (Portals Press) and edited the anthology, Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine. His poetry-films have been regularly screened and awarded in international film festivals such as Buenos Aires International Film Festival and NYC’s North Film Festival.
Judge’s Comments:
Rather like Edip Cansever in his poem ‘Table’, this poem begins with what seems to be a recognisable situation: a doorman standing outside a nightclub in New York’s SoHo district choosing whom to let in. But the surprises and brilliant twists come quickly after the first five lines. This is a real tour-de-force of a poem.
In 3rd place: Sophia Argyris – Stone Beaches
Sophia Argyris is of British-Greek origin, born in Belgium. Her work has appeared in Mslexia, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, and been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She is author of ‘Heronless’ (Palewell Press) and her next pamphlet ‘Blood Tundra’ is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books in 2026.
Judge’s Comments:
Competition entries were anonymous, identified only by numbers, but five poems, numbers 206-210, were clearly all by the same poet, not only shown by the same typography but all of them relating in one way or another to people, mortality and travel, offering perspectives on the world we live in – and the times we’re living through – by what the poet sees and experiences in other places. I could have chosen ‘Live Departures’, ‘Coda, Submerged’, ‘View from a Train’ or ‘View from a Train II’, but in the end I felt that more of what the poet draws upon in this remarkable series comes together most fully in ‘Stone Beaches’.
In addition, the six commended poets are:
day mattar – a real cowboy
Milla van der Have – Augury of the crash
Ben Verinder – Red peonies
Mark Fiddes – Aboveness
Cameron McGill – The Present
Mark Doris – Blue tits
THE WINNING POEMS
I am thinking of my mother
by Jonathan Edwards
leaving the house those mornings, evenings, through my childhood,
to give a talk about the charity
that raises money to help children with the cancer
that killed my sister. I am thinking of how she practised,
standing in the bedroom, saying the speech aloud, over
and over, praying the words, I am thinking
of her handwriting, the scraps of paper, how nervous she’d get,
how she always said she knew
she’d mess it up this time. I am thinking of her
walking into those rooms – a Rotary club, a school assembly –
all those faces looking up at her,
I am thinking of her, stepping forward and opening her mouth,
the first words coming in a voice
she’s trying to keep steady. And I’m thinking
of my father, waiting outside in the car, the way
he longs to help but can’t go in, can’t bear to hear her
saying those words, and when she practises at home
and needs someone to listen, the way I listen
and tell her it was brilliant. I am thinking
of my father, a younger man than I am now,
waiting outside those buildings in the car –
what was he doing, while she was inside?
Maybe he had to turn the radio up, to carry his mind away,
but when I think of him I think of him
hands tight around the wheel, staring out the windscreen, tense
as any getaway driver. Until he hears
applause like rainfall from inside the room, then sees her walking
back to him, across the car park, getting in the car
and he asks her how it was. In The Mabinogion,
there is this cauldron, you can put
someone who’s died inside and – click your fingers –
they stand before you, alive again. How did my parents
keep on living? I’ve never known what to say to them
about any of this, it’s always been there
in every room we’ve shared, I only know what I want
is to step through this line I’m writing now
into that car where they are sitting –
all this is thirty years ago –
I only know I want to take them in my arms
and change all of it, change every bit of this.
Doorman at a Club in SoHo
by Michael Martin
He works behind the velvet rope.
Tonight he’ll let in a flagging starlet and a minor Senator.
The place will be jumping.
Tonight, he can’t say No,
not with the full moon like it is.
He lets in fog.
He lets in two puny doves.
He allows for Grief, and her best friend, Beauty.
He lets in lost semesters and a nude polaroid of her.
His dead father Roy steps out of a taxi-cab.
I forgot to tell you goodbye son, dead Roy says.
A paper cup rolls down the sidewalk.
He thinks he sees her again, driving that convertible.
Shifting gears with her cigarette hand.
The Life He Has Lived turns the corner.
Spiffy. Polished shoes and a tailcoat.
The Life He Has Lived removes the purple rope
and wraps it around his neck like a boa.
He bums a light. Blows a kiss.
The Life He Has Lived steps inside.
Hands behind his back.
Like he’s walking
into some masterpiece or something.
Stone Beaches
by Sophia Argyris
On Plage des Ponchettes I’m lazy
in shorts and bikini. Plane after plane flies in
over the sea. Societies shift their weight
and on-screen people spit at the feet of others.
How can one person know what another believes?
Governments will do as they please and call it
our will. My friend texts to tell me they’ve closed
the airspace over her country, bombs are falling.
These pebbles leave chalky smudges and war
is hard to hold onto here where distance
is its own amnesia. Along the road locals
and visitors shop. Five soldiers in casual formation
carry guns close to their torsos. Humanity splits
round them in streams, never through the gaps
between their bodies. At a café I order une noisette.
None of this is new but we live moments.
A shoal of children in red life vests pepper
the waves, diving and bobbing up again.
The gut only ever remembers trouble.
A waiter flirts with an American tourist.
Yellow moths litter the air between chairs.
Far out in the loop of bay someone swims
alone and diminishing.
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.
