Last night our 2025 judge Ella Frears announced her picks for the 2025 Folio – our annual anthology in which we feature poems entered in our members’ only poetry competition.
The poems chosen for Folio 79 (due to be published later in the year) are:
First prize: Paul Robert – What Kind of Soup
Second prize: Veronica Beedham – How to Catch Light
Third prize: Satya Bosman – Last night I dreamt I was Emily Brontë
Highly commended
Jill Munro – Awash with cumin
Phil Vernon – Ceasefire
Martin Cordrey – Dating after Divorce
Roger West – STOP
Sarah Salway – The Robot Ingests the Beaufort Wind Scale
Laura Clout – Waiting
Mary Gurr – Ways of Seeing or Bullshitting
Commended
Alex Josephy – Tangents
Alison Sinclair – Last Autumn
Ann-Frances Luther – 11.11.1918 – Put down your arms
Caroline Franklyn – Appointment
Caroline Franklyn – The Best Sandwiches
Charlie Bell – Foganuary
Diana Hills – Application for Disability Benefit
Gareth Adams – Remembering Margaret
Gareth Adams – Family Snapshot
Kevin Scully – The Fourteenth Station
A.K. Davidson – Winter
Steve Walter – Dear Lithium
David Hensley – The watcher in the grass
Lucy Duckworth – WFH in Spring
Judge’s Report, Ella Frears
The quality of poems for this year’s Folio Competition was exceptional. It was a real joy to spend time with them. I know, you’re thinking – ‘I bet you say this to all the societies’ – but really, the poems were good. Playful, meditative, moving and surprising.
This year there were 144 poems. Common themes I noticed were nature (specifically the seasons), loss, memory, history, and for some reason the Beaufort wind scale. There was heartbreak, vulnerability and emotional charge but also silliness, which I always admire and am grateful for in a poem. It was lovely to see that form is alive and well in Kent and Sussex – there were sestinas, villanelles, sonnets, exciting line breaks, impressive use of rhyme and metre, and of course many brilliant free verse poems – poems that were marching to the beat of their own formal decisions.
It was tough to narrow the poems down to 3 prizewinners and 7 highly commended. In the end I had to go with the poems that had affected me most, the lines that had stuck in my head – echoing as I loaded the dishwasher, or looked out of a train window. This is what I most want my work to do – to stay with the reader. And so I chose the poems that stayed with me. That made me laugh, or changed the way I saw or understood something. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 