This week on My Poetic Side, we take a look at the land linked to Siegfried Sassoon that has gone back up for auction, and the winners of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.

Historic Land Once Owned by Poet Re-listed

A historic plot of land in Heytesbury has been re-listed for auction at triple the price it was previously listed for .

The site, which once belonged to the novelist and war poet Siegfried Sassoon, has been placed on the market for £1 million. It was previously listed at just £330,000. There is no planning permission granted for the land which has long been used as a space for recreation by the local community. They are now fighting to protect this use of the land with the Heytesbury Recreation Ground Trust saying they are very disappointed to see the land being placed back on the market.

Sassoon spent time in Heytesbury recovering from shell shock and the horrors of the First World War and left the property to his estate. The fields which were used for two of his passions – cricket and football – during his lifetime have been used as a recreation ground for the village until a couple of years ago when they were first put on the market. At that time, the community undertook fundraising efforts to buy the land; however, they were not successful.

Locals are now disappointed that the land has been “parcelled up” by those who purchased it and put on the market for such a significant mark-up.

2025 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner Announced

Professor Karen Leeder, who is based in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, has been named as this year’s winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The winning collection is her English translation of

The poems were written in their original German by the poet Durs Grünbein.

The Griffin Poetry Prize is an international one that recognises excellence in either written poetry or poetry that has been translated into English. The winning translation was chosen from amongst 578 submissions representing 17 countries and 20 languages. The prize fund for this award is one of the largest in its field, totalling C$130,000 and is split 40% to the original author and 60% to the translator.

This is the most recent award Leeder has won for her translation work. She has also been the recipient of a number of other prizes.

Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025 Winner Announced

Amelia Loulli has been named as the winner of this year’s Seamus Heaney First Poetry Collection award. Her winning work is “Slip.” A PhD candidate at Newcastle University, Loulli won the Northern Writers’ Award in 2021 and was the British School in Rome’s writer in residence in 2023.

Speaking after the win, Loulli thanked the judges for selecting her collection as the winner and mentioned that it had been a long time in the making; having Slip recognised in this way was a particular honour.