Announcing the 2025/26 Poetry Prize Shortlist

We're excited to share the 2025/26 Derby Poetry Festival Prize Shortlist. We had a remarkable number of entries, and this year's quality of submissions was impossibly high.

We enjoyed reading every poem submitted and know many of the poems will go on to have a home beyond us, and we look forward to seeing some of the submitted work out in the world in the future.

When thinking back to what this year's judge, Jake Wild-Hall, said, “...the most important thing about a poem is that it is authentically you. We find honesty and beauty in all things, and whatever makes you write is the thing I am looking for. Dig deep into what it means to make you human and leave it for me to read”. This year's poems certainly do that.

When poems are submitted to us, the team goes through an annonymises all entries, so we're all excited when we de-annonymised the entries to reveal the shortlist. This year we've had a few familiar names, poets who've made the shortlist before or performed at DPF events and some brand new faces, this is what excites us the most about the poetry prize, all the poets we get to meet.

The 2025/26 Derby Poetry Festival Poetry Prize Shortlist:

Grace Atkinson	Katy Perry We Love You Get Down
Lucky Azad	The Tragedy of the Untasted Banana (All That Calcium Gone to Waste)
Ali El-Jabal	GHOSTHOOD
Victor Basta	The Locrian Curse
Joan Baxter	How to eat kiwi fruit
Taylor Beidler	Divining Rod As Straight Culture
igor dos santos mota	the barn
George Dunn	ROSLA
Jordan Hamel	Jesus Can’t Play Rugby
Jen Horsfall	Babyface
Emma Hutson Perla Kantarjian	Un-listening
Perla Kantarjian	Notes for Submission
Jade King	Little Miss Everything
Nigel King	Remembrance
Esther Lay	Deployment
Sylvia Marie	The Men are Palestinian too
James McDermott	“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”
Vicky Morris	Introductions
Jess Murrain	Hotdogs, Placenta in your fridge
Damen O’Brien	The Long Game
Jack Paul	A List of Things I’ve Used as a Bookmark
Estelle Price	A conversation with my nonagenarian father-in-law
Dulcie Shaw	A FRIDAY NIGHT IN NEWTON ABBOTS YE OLDE CIDER BAR
Ruaa Mohammed Rushdy Shiba AL-Temawe	WHEN THE SIGNAL GOES COLD
Bradley Taylor	A MAN JOINS A SALSA CLASS AND BECOMES A LOCUST GOD
Lydia Unsworth	Silo Auto
Glen Wilson	Creeping thyme

If the titles of this year's shortlist tell you anything, it's that this year's list spoke to so many different themes and people's stories.

Thank you again to everyone who submitted, and a huge congratulations to the shortlisted poets