This week in our poetry news round up we look at the winners of this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry and the death of the Saudi poet Muhammad Al-Ali.
Sarah Howe Wins 2026 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Sarah Howe has been named the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, one of the most coveted awards in British poetry, for her collection Foretokens. The winners were announced at a ceremony hosted by the poet Joelle Taylor at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday 24th October, with Howe taking home the £10,000 prize.
Foretokens, her second full collection, explores new parenthood, the death of her father and her mother’s early life in Hong Kong. It arrives a decade after her debut, Loop of Jade, made history in January 2016 as the first debut collection ever to win the T. S. Eliot Prize. Foretokens was also shortlisted for last year’s T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Forward Prizes’ co-executive director, Mónica Parle, called it an exceptional book that still speaks to our times after ten years in the making.
Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and a Chinese mother, Howe moved to England as a child. She studied English at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and later spent five years as a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College – the same college where JH Prynne spent much of his career.
The Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, worth £5,000, went to Nur Turkmani for October. Turkmani, who grew up in Beirut and now lives in Lisbon, wrote most of the poems in Beirut during a period marked by protests, wildfires, economic collapse, the port explosion and war. It was the first nomination and first win for her publisher, the independent Hajar Press, and October is also shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize, to be announced on 1st December.
The Best Single Poem – Written prize went to the Dublin-born poet Tara Bergin for ‘The Fear’, first published in the Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly, while the Scottish singer-songwriter Biff Smith won Best Single Poem – Performed for ‘Dumbarton East’, a poem he wrote on a train. Both receive £1,000.
This year’s judges were chaired by the novelist Sarah Moss, alongside the poets Romalyn Ante, WN Herbert, Michael Mullen and Yomi Ṣode. Moss said that poetry was no panacea in dark times, but that poets give us “words, images and metaphors for what matters in interesting times.” First awarded in 1992, the Forward Prizes have previously celebrated the likes of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Claudia Rankine.
Saudi Modernist Poet Muhammad Al-Ali Dies Aged 94
Muhammad Abdullah Al-Ali, the poet and thinker widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist poetry in Saudi Arabia, has died at the age of 94. Al-Ali, known affectionately as “Abu Adel”, passed away on the evening of Tuesday 27th October, ending a career in literature, teaching and journalism that spanned almost seven decades.
Born in 1932 in the village of Al-Omran in Al-Ahsa, Al-Ali received his early education at a traditional Quranic school, where he memorized the Quran. He went on to study in Iraq, graduating from the University of Baghdad in 1962. Returning home, he began teaching at a secondary school in Dammam in 1965 and spent around 19 years in education before moving to the Royal Commission in Jubail.
He was also a respected journalist, serving for two years as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Al-Yaum, where he wrote the popular column Water Words. His essays and articles were later gathered into several books, among them Olympic Rings: Articles on Enlightenment and Modernity Issues, while his poetry collection No Water in the Water was published in 2009. His work blended poetry, philosophy and cultural criticism, and he is credited with helping to establish the modern poem in Saudi literature.
Recognition came later in life. In 2015 a poetry festival in Dammam named its first edition in his honour, and in 2022 he received the Prince Abdullah Al-Faisal International Prize for Arabic Poetry for his body of work. Asked how he wished to be remembered, he once said he simply hoped to be known as someone who had tried to change the way society thinks.
Al-Ali was laid to rest on Wednesday 28th October at the Martyrs’ Cemetery in Al-Jash, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.
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