This week in our poetry news round up we look at the winners of this year’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and the appointment of the Isle of Wight’s very first Poet Laureate.
Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2026 Announced
Illustration by Emily Haworth-Booth for The Poetry Society.
The Poetry Society has announced the winners of the 2026 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, one of the biggest and most prestigious poetry competitions in the world for writers aged 11 to 17. The 100 winners, made up of 15 top poets and 85 commended poets, were announced on Monday 12th October, with the top 15 celebrated at a special ceremony at the British Library in London.
This year’s competition attracted 11,798 poems from 10,598 young poets, with entries arriving from 153 countries. The judges were the poets John McAuliffe, Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester, and Rachel Long, whose debut My Darling from the Lions was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Long said the pair were “bowled over by the sheer talent” of the entries.
The winning poems roam across cultural heritage, family, food and the state of the nation, as well as whales, spiders, rats and, perhaps inevitably, David Attenborough and Love Island. Among the top 15 are poems with titles such as Knock ‘Em Dead, Mum!, The Meaning of Blinis and Rust-Green Jar of Sky.
One of the top 15 is 17-year-old Olivia Danks from Bedford, whose poem welcome home, persephone was the first piece of work she had ever shared. Danks, who is studying for her A-levels and hopes to read literature at university, named Mary Oliver‘s Wild Geese as her current favourite poem and said that being a Foyle Young Poet “means the world”.
The top 15 poems will appear in a free printed anthology, We Write our Names on the Walls, and all 100 winners receive mentoring, a year’s youth membership of the Poetry Society and a selection of books.
This year marks a new chapter for the award. The Foyle Foundation, its funder since 2001, closed at the end of 2025 but left a legacy grant to support the competition for the next ten years. Past winners include Jay Bernard, Helen Mort, Caroline Bird and Sarah Howe, who went on to win the T. S. Eliot Prize and whose latest collection, Foretokens, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, to be awarded on 24th October.
Isle of Wight Names Its First Poet Laureate
The Isle of Wight has appointed its first ever Poet Laureate, with writer, illustrator and spoken word performer Sarah Nicole chosen to act as the island’s poetic ambassador for the next two years. The announcement was made on Thursday 15th October at a ceremony at Quay Arts in Newport.
It is a fitting appointment for an island with such a rich literary past. Alfred, Lord Tennyson made his home at Farringford in Freshwater while serving as the nation’s Poet Laureate, John Keats wrote his sonnet On the Sea during a stay on the island in 1817, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who spent much of his childhood at Bonchurch, is buried there.
Sarah Nicole was chosen from a shortlist of five island poets, alongside Kathryn Rossati, Harrison Wavell, Tim Martin and Nina Plapp. Each was asked to write an original poem offering a new perspective on a place on the island, and the final decision went to a public vote that drew close to 1,000 responses.
A graduate in French and Communications, she began her career at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation before going freelance in 2020. Her work spans poetry, illustration, design and spoken word, and last year she self-published Diamond: The Pleasures and Perils of Living on an Island, a collection on the contradictions of island life that was printed in Freshwater. She said she was “over the moon and absolutely thrilled” to have been chosen.
The programme was founded by Lottie Begg of the independent publisher Lemon Jelly Press, supported by a committee that includes Quay Arts, Creative Island, the Isle of Wight County Press, Red Funnel Ferries and Forestry England. A new laureate will be appointed every two years, and in 2027 the programme plans to run creative writing workshops in five island schools, with the young writers’ work collected in a published anthology.
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