Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award Winners

MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: Idea Generation

The Foyle Young Poets of the Year - the Poetry Society’s prestigious prize for young writers - received a record breaking 20,510 entries. Now in its 13th year, The Foyle Young Poets Award for 11 –17 year-olds holds up a looking glass to a young person's experience of the world.

This year’s judges, Jane Draycott and Luke Kennard were astounded, not only by the numbers, but the boldness of these young voices and the daring way they go beyond the everyday. As Kennard explains, “Teenagers don't hold back, they are not afraid of over-reaching yet" and that coupled with what Draycott describes as a "faith in the imagination" has created poems that are "widely adventurous and show intellectual curiosity".

It is this “faith in the imagination” that is so striking in the poems. In all of them we find ourselves in exotic, dark or surreal landscapes, often in the company of some very singular characters. For example, the inquisitive house sitter who finds herself falling in love with a half-grasped idea of the owner in Manchester-based Fielding Ronshaugen’s winning poem ‘House Sitting for Mr Brown’:

Under the loose floor boards in the kitchen
She finds a box of fairy lights, labelled (neatly)
For When in Need of Cheer.
In her imagination, it is raining.
Mr Brown looks at the grey sky and
makes his ceiling full of stars.
She falls in love (with the house).

In the current time of uncertainty, many of the poems evoke a sense of being adrift or physically lost. This is the case in Sussex-based Fergus Blair’s poem ‘In Cerrejón’, where an unfortunate tourist is lost in a swamp, with only snakes to eat and his imagination to help him survive:

I couldn’t give a damn about
Natural sandpaper, I thought
As I bit the head off a snake.
Chewy, like the centre of
A muffin.
I like to pretend that
My sister writes me.
I tear up random leaves
And the lines are of pen
Telling me it’ll be OK.

Some of the poems have a real sense of menace, such as in ‘Him,’ a poem by Mauritius-based poet
Ameerah Arjanee:

Tall mirrors enthroned in the hallways of haunted houses. I was short, short as a skinny acne-faced
teenager who wanted to be Dostoevsky and found coffee too strong to be. I wanted to stand on tiptoes
and look into him. But I could not touch his peppered grey hair. He had a wife who could reach down
and punctuate me like a pustule with her willowy crimson nails.

These poems celebrate the power of the imagination - at a time when it is hard to imagine what the future holds. The Judges were also struck by the sheer skill and confidence in these works. The “evidence of wide reading and technical accomplishment” particularly impressed Kennard while Draycott admired the "directness to the reader which any adult writer would envy."

The top 15 Foyle Young Poets of the Year will attend a residential writing week at the Hurst Arvon Centre in Shropshire or receive a poet visit to their school. All winning poets will become Youth Members of the Poetry Society and will begin or continue a supportive and encouraging relationship with the UK’s leading poetry organisation.

Top 15 Young Poets of the Year, and their poems

Ameerah Arjanee, 16, Mauritius, Him
Fergus Blair, 18, Sussex, In Cerrejón
Kim Clark, 17, Somerset, A Toast
Eleanor Coy, 13, Buckinghamshire, On the Beach
Ella Duffy, 15, Manchester, Night Boy
Dom Hale, 17, Thornton-Cleveleys, prayer in picture
Kiera Hall, 13,Staffordshire, First Shear
Sara Henry, 17,Connecticut, USA, Work Night
Evie Cassandra Ioannidi, 16, Athens, Greece, Don’t Go with the
Flow, Make the Flow go With You
Sarah Lucas, 17, Sussex, Dr Livingstone Writes to Stanley
Catherine Olver, 17, London, Ascent of Toubkal
Fielding Ronshaugen, 17, Manchester, House Sitting for Mr Brown
Daisy Syme-Taylor, 17, Wiltshire, rivers
Phoebe Stuckes, 15, Somerset, Images from My Previous Dreams
Sherrie Talgeri, 15, Berkshire, nobody ever wins, nobody ever
loses