Forward Prizes 2025
Selected by the Bookshop
The Forward Prizes for Poetry are the most influential awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland, honouring fresh voices alongside internationally established names. Here are the contenders for 2025’s Best Collection and Best First Collection awards.
From the publisher:
Through the porosity of the US/Mexico border, Freudian slippages, and toxic relationships, poet Juana Adcock interrogates what it means to cross from one country into another – the gradient spaces that inhabit the nexus between life…
From the publisher:
A family sets out on a journey across South America, thereby setting in motion a glittering, encyclopaedic evocation of the continent, and a reckoning with its past both personal and political'Vivid ... A memoir of queer love, loss and…
From the publisher:
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2024The Island in the Sound, the third collection by South Uist poet Niall Campbell, creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his…
From the publisher:
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025These poems emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise…
From the publisher:
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025Wellwater demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a…
From the publisher:
Award-winning debut collection from Pakistani-American poet. Described as a "fearless and tender gem" by Ocean Vuong.In Theophanies, award-winning poet Sarah Ghazal Ali testifies to women's capacity for piercing and musical exegesis and…
From the publisher:
WINNER OF THE JERWOOD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZEPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONA piercing debut about how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves.Framed by the story of escape…
From the publisher:
Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025A Poetry Book Society Commendation'How the noise in my head grows and grows,splinters into phantoms and shapes,graceless muses for her cot-mobile.How I terror.'Moving…
From the publisher:
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2025darling slough,i love you like rain.graveyard with no tombstones.adventure playground some childrenplay on, others lie underneath. i can’t walk through the newbuildswithout hearing…
From the publisher:
The debut poetry collection by award-winning writer and spoken word artist Michael Mullen, Goonie is a paean of working class life, queer triumph, community, and the sensual power of poetry.SHORTLISTED FOR FORWARD PRIZE BEST FIRST…
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