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New Writers Poetry Competition 2025 – Results

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After detailed and careful consideration, our Head Judge Katrina Moinet has chosen the winners of the New Writers Poetry Competition 2025.

We received almost 700 entries to the competition, and we’d like to thank everyone who entered. Massive congratulations to those who were picked to win a prize or who made the shortlist or longlist. If your entry didn’t make it on this occasion, please don’t be disheartened – the standard was extremely high and there were scores of poems that were brilliant and which might well feature in the shortlists of other competitions in the future, so don’t give up on them.

Also, the competition helped raise money for two fantastic UK-registered charities First Story and The Funzi & Bodo Trust. We have transferred the donations (10% of entry fees received) and we know the cash will have positive effects.

Portrait of a Young Girl Falling – Katrina Moinet

We are extremely grateful to our amazing Head Judge Katrina Moinet, who spent so much time, effort and care selecting the winners, honourable mentions, shortlist and longlist (from the top 100 entries initially selected by the New Writers Editorial Team). If you would like to read Katrina’s award-winning Portrait of a Young Girl Falling, you can purchase a copy HERE.

And now is the time to find out the six winners, the honourable mentions, and the poems that were picked for the shortlist and longlist. (Click on the titles to read the winning entries.) The winners will also be published in the next New Writers Anthology (the last one can be found HERE).

Note that the New Writers Historical Flash Fiction Competition – with a top prize of £500 – is open for entries until 5th November 2025 – you can find the competition details HERE.

Winners

First Prize (£1,200): Rewind by Kirsty Jones

Poet bio: Kirsty Jones is a Bristol-based poet and creative facilitator. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. She has undertaken commissions for high-profile venues and is currently working on her first collection. Find her at kirstyjoneswrites.com or on Instagram @k_jones_writer.

Head Judge’s Comments: I held my breath through the cinematic unravelling of this winning poem. Each snapshot stanza is a puzzle reliant on reading further to interpret what came later, what came before. This poem delivers undoes then redelivers. Form reflects content to startling effect, aligned right, tapering to a dramatic full stop which, through an adept deconstruction of time, becomes the poem’s starting point. This is so well crafted that the reader will also find a thread to read the poem up/backwards. The ‘after’ to Nate Marshall’s palindrome is itself a nod further back to Lisa Mueller, entering multiple conversations linked to time and memory.

Like any poet, I love a poem which delivers a journey for the reader that reaches beyond the pure page – during multiple readings of this poem, I slipped down rabbit-hole searches, one of which led to Lisa Mueller’s comment about “the miracle and the accident that it is that any of us are who we are.” Which returns us to the trauma of ‘Rewind’, and what surfaced in me about how memory works itself deeply into identity, emotion, responses over many years. How traumas cannot be undone. That process of deconstruction we must perform to allow life beyond the traumas and incidents that shape us, or those we’d rather forget. Or perhaps by remembering, we reshape ourselves.

Second Prize (£300): Matchbox Chapel by Natasha Kinsella

Poet bio: Natasha Kinsella is an Irish poet whose work explores silence, survival, and cultural inheritance. Her poems move between the intimate and the collective, drawing on Irish landscapes, rituals, and memory to trace how shame and resilience are carried across generations. Both lyrical and uncompromising, her writing attends to the fractures where grief, care, and defiance intersect.

Author’s note on inspiration: Matchbox Chapel was inspired by a moment when my child created a small chapel for a dead bee placing it gently on a glove, surrounding it with petals, and treating it with ceremony. That act of tenderness and ritual became the seed for the poem.

Head Judge’s Comments: Each time this poem gave me shivers… such lightness of touch, female myth-making, wisdoms emerging from the domestic space, girls spinning protection spells in order to navigate the world on terms greater than blind faith. Love it. ‘Sheets pegged into sky tents / pale chapels for girls already learning to vanish’. There’s a recurring, almost religious repetition of the hush, the quiet, the silence. Such disillusionment at the tasteless wafer. The poem inwardly urges these girls to find their voice, to build their own rituals, to tear through the velvet-rope histories and author new retellings.

Third Prize (£150): The thing about abusers is by Rach PS

Head Judge’s Comments: There is a disconnect between how women experience vulnerability, how society views vulnerability, and how frequently people manipulate another person’s vulnerability for their own gains. The speaker in this poem could be any woman, could be me. Being coerced into intimacy, is far from consent. This poet takes a risk in telling it how it is. Taking risks with a poem is an important part of the creative process for the poet. Sharing that poem becomes important for its many readers.

The run-on title works brilliantly, thoughts flow through stanzas, each moving inevitably onto the next in a way that feels unstoppable. There’s a familiarity in using the second person address that works on two levels: bringing the reader into an intimate space and as a reminder of the insidious nature of manipulation. Tensions build to stanza eleven where you realize, before even reaching your first pause, what has happened. This is a piercing depiction of vulnerability. The final stanza contains this universal ‘tell’ – how we entrust our safety to a single word and the hope it is heeded And a devastating last line that shoots through me every time.

Fourth to Sixth Places (£50 each)

And the three other prize-winning entries that complete the top six (in alphabetical order by entry title):

Poet bio: Aidan is a native of Dun Laoghaire (Ireland) and studied English and Philosophy in Dublin. Since then, he has taught English (EFL) in Spain, Germany and Ireland and developed a number of mobile language learning apps. He writes across a range of forms from story to free verse to song lyric. His poems have featured in numerous online reviews and been shortlisted/commended or won prizes in numerous competitions in ROI and the UK. More info and readings HERE.

Head Judge’s Comments: Utterly brilliant! Humour from the start, witty, delectable. Brian Bilston-esque in its plain speak, revealing our very human shortcomings.

Poet bio: Dillon Jaxx is a queer, chronically ill writer. Their work explores the aftermath of trauma, illness and addiction as well as the meaning of home, family and identity. Their work has been published in Poetry Wales, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review and The Alchemy Spoon amongst others. Dillon has been placed and commended in numerous competitions and won the Rebecca Swift Writing Prize 2022, the Brotherton prize 2024, the Wolverhampton poetry competition 2024, the Live Canon International Poetry Competition 2025, the Artemisia Arts Prize 2025.

Head Judge’s Comments: Form and content successfully complement each other in this exceptionally well-crafted, surreal poem. This semi-sonnet does not settle easily into a single interpretation: perhaps we are in the presence of a failed IVF journey, perhaps the aftermath of miscarriage, perhaps pre-parenting anxiety. This ambiguity, this rational voice presenting us the surreal, appealed to me. We’re drawn into the intimacy of being shown the inside of someone’s womb and being told the inconceivable as possibility. Reminiscent of Hannah Hodgson’s ‘Mermaids on the Brain’. Here, the bullet points provide both a beat and breath between phrases, like some ghostly pulse.

Poet bio: Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains/Qué queda (Editorial DALYA, forthcoming 2026), a bilingual English/Spanish poetry collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024). Poems and translations appear in such noted journals as Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature, and International Poetry Review, as well as anthologies London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023). Her Best of the Net-nominated work has garnered support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and Under the Volcano. Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell’s Senior Digital Systems Strategist. Read more at ivyraff.com.

Head Judge’s Comments: This poem’s title drew me in. From the outset, I felt guided with care through the rituals of cicada life cycles as a metaphor for reproduction and losing the body’s creation capacity. There was an epigraph to Japanese death ritual poetry unfamiliar to me, but being in ‘the late september of life’, I connected with the grief which accompanies those final bleeds of menopause, and each egg death. As this sequence moves from sky to soil, mouth to thigh, thumb, lung, the resonance of the body’s journey recomposing itself felt both personal and universal.

Honourable Mentions

Here are three poems that narrowly missed out on a prize but which Katrina felt deserved honourable mentions (in alphabetical order by entry title).

  • Gifts by Lorna Easterbrook
  • Lambing by Natalie Ann Holborow
  • Spun Sugar by Kirsty Crawford

Shortlist

Here are the other entries that the Head Judge selected for the shortlist (in alphabetical order by entry title):

  • Anopheles Mephistopheles by Joseph Long
  • Carrot Seeds by Esther Lay
  • En Vie by Katherine Moss
  • griot by Ivy Raff
  • I WhatsApp my beloved photos of baby birds from the canal towpath by Mike Farren
  • Keeping small by Rach PS
  • Le Refus by Joe Cheesman
  • Mycelium (Love) Fever by Tamsin Peto-Dias
  • Past Lives by Ben Verinder
  • Self Portrait With NASA by D A Angelo
  • they fed the robot our poems and now it dreams in sestinas by ailsa
  • Virginia by Perri Redford

Longlist

Here are the entries that were picked for the longlist, with several there were in contention that just missed out on this occasion (in alphabetical order by entry title):

  • A Walk in the Park with Einstein’s Ghost by Kate Fenwick
  • Caesura by Joe Cheesman
  • Chandelier by Natasha Kinsella
  • Extinction’s Not So Terrible If You’re Not Facing It by Jonathan Greenhause
  • Hand-Me-Downs by Bri Stoever
  • HippOpotaMusEs by Adam Makowiecki
  • Hunger Games in the Rubble by Shakiba Hashemi
  • I Am (Just a Story Written by Other People) by Peter Devonald
  • I Count When I’m Swimming by Rosie Mowatt
  • I see myself in you by Salya Shaban
  • I want the perfect pitch by Christian Donovan
  • I’m not talking because every time i talk blood comes out of my mouth and makes my clothes dirty and i don’t want my mom to have to clean it by igor dos santos mota
  • Long Meg and Her Daughters by Karen Atkinson
  • Love on the Dole (I’m so in love with you) by Joshua Hallam
  • Parturition by Clara Shakespear
  • Sharp, biro-like umbrella tips by Lana Silver
  • SLIDE by Joshua Ryan
  • Sort Your Head Out by Rosie Mowatt
  • Starling by Ezra Jay Vine
  • Suffolk strangler by Rach PS
  • Terra Incognita by Anna Whyatt
  • The Smell of the Hare by Sylvie Jane Lewis
  • Thrall by Joe Cheesman
  • when i am in the woods by Kathleen Madigan
  • When writing on nature rather than a 3am gang fight makes much more sense by David Camp

Thank you to everyone who entered, and an extra thank you to Katrina Moinet, the Head Judge. We hope you enjoy the winning entries, and we wish you all the best with your writing endeavours. Best wishes from The New Writers Team.

p.s. If you like what we’re doing at NewWriters.org.uk, please consider donating at our Ko-fi.com page. We’ll use any donations to offer more regular free competitions (with bigger prizes) and more free entries to our paid competition to those on low incomes. 

Thank you to everyone who entered. If you’d like to find out about our upcoming writing competitions – both free-to-enter and those with an entry fee such as the Historical Flash Fiction Competition (£500 top prize) – as well as writing prompts, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter (we send one each month and will never share your email address or any other information with anyone else).

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