Hello all!
Following the award’s ceremony and meet-up hosted by our judge Mimi Khalvati, we’re excited to officially publish the names of our winners for this year’s competition. In the coming days, we will publish each person’s poem – which will be linked here as we post: so keep an eye out!
Before we post the list, we would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who sent us their poetry. It’s always a delight to see what you send, and we’re so honoured that you trusted us with your work. Please do not feel discouraged: continue to send your work to our future competitions, we’d love to see them.
Now, let’s get to the list of our wonderful winners:
1st: My Father Sits His Driving Test — Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards lives in Crosskeys, South Wales. His award-winning collections, My Family and Other Superheroes and Gen, are published by Seren. His poems have recently won prizes in the Ledbury, Troubadour, Frogmore and Guernsey competitions. He is an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund.
2nd: My headband has eleven moth holes — Sharon Black
Sharon Black is from Glasgow and lives in a remote valley of the Cévennes mountains. In 2025 she won The Poetry Society’s inaugural Tobias Hill Prize, the Kent & Sussex Open, and the Wells Open poetry competitions. Her fifth full collection will be published in May 2026. She is editor of Pindrop Press. www.sharonblack.co.uk
3rd: Kyoto Egret — Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana is author of Salt poetry bestseller, Sing me down from the dark. Her second collection, Skinship, is out with Salt this Autumn. She is widely published in journals including The North, P.N. Review and Magma, and is a tutor for the Poetry School and The Poetry Business.
4th: No. 80 Interior with a Table — Fokkina McDonnell
Fokkina McDonnell’s poems have been widely published and anthologised. She has three collections and a pamphlet. Fokkina received a Northern Writers’ Award in 2020 for Remembering / Disease, published by Broken Sleep Books. She blogs and features guest poets on www.acaciapublications.co.uk Fokkina now lives in the Netherlands.
4th: No. 685 The (Glorious) Wordlessness of Painting — Mary Gurr
Mary Gurr has published poems in several poetry magazines and an anthology of prose poems, and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Kent.
4th: No. 115 This morning — Paul Blake
Paul Blake is a retired medical writer who has worked for international organisations in London, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. He has had poems published in a number of journals and anthologies and a chapbook, A Massacre of Hummingbirds, published by Stonewood Press.
4th: No. 119 The teachers — Duncan Chambers
Duncan Chambers lives in York. He has had work published in magazines including The Rialto, Magma and The North. He won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2018 and his pamphlet Sleeping Through the Moon Landing (4Word Press) appeared in 2020. He is still working on his debut collection.
Thank you again to everyone who sent us their work. Here’s to another brilliant year of poetry!
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 