This week in our poetry news round up we look at the record-breaking year poetry is having in the bookshops and the winner of the Chair at this year’s National Eisteddfod.
UK Poetry Sales on Course for a Record Year
Poetry is having a moment. Figures from the market researchers NielsenIQ show that poetry sales in the UK passed £8m during the first thirty weeks of 2026, an increase of 13.3% on the same stretch last year. If the momentum holds through the autumn, the category is expected to break through £15m in annual sales for the first time since accurate records began, and some in the trade think £17m is not out of the question.
A good deal of the credit belongs to a poet who has been dead for the better part of three thousand years. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, which arrived in cinemas in the middle of July with Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Anne Hathaway among the cast, sent audiences straight back to the source. UK print sales of Homer‘s epic rose by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25th July compared with the same period in 2025. Between them, editions of The Odyssey and The Iliad have accounted for £980,000 of poetry spending so far this year, which works out at roughly £1.20 of every £10 spent on poetry books in Britain. Homer is now in with a shout of the record for the highest annual sales by a single poet in the UK, a benchmark set by Rupi Kaur back in 2017. The effect has been felt across the Atlantic too, where American print sales of The Odyssey are up 76% on the year.
Strip Homer out of the numbers altogether, though, and the category is still up 7.2% and still on course for its best year. The three years from 2023 to 2025 were already the most lucrative on record, so this is a trend rather than a one-off. Writing in the Guardian last Friday, Ella Risbridger made the case that the real story is a new generation of poets who have built their audiences on Instagram and TikTok and then gone on to sell out theatres – Lucas Jones, Donna Ashworth, Nikita Gill, Hollie McNish, Lemn Sissay and Len Pennie among them. Their work, she argued, has rather more in common with Homer than you might first assume: poetry written to be spoken aloud, shared and passed along, rather than pinned to the page.
Emyr Lewis Wins the Chair at Eisteddfod y Garreg Las
The National Eisteddfod of Wales has closed after eight days at Llantood, a few miles outside Cardigan, and the week’s most prestigious literary honour went to Emyr Lewis. Lewis was chaired on Friday 7th August for an awdl on the theme Llinell / Llinellau (Line / Lines), composed in full cynghanedd – the intricate system of consonance and internal rhyme that has governed Welsh strict-metre poetry for centuries, and which so fascinated Gerard Manley Hopkins when he was learning Welsh in the 1870s.
It is the second Chair for Lewis, who first won in 1994 at the Neath and District National Eisteddfod and took the Crown four years later in 1998. He is Professor Emeritus at Aberystwyth University, where he headed the Department of Law and Criminology, worked as a lawyer until 2019, and has served on a Council of Europe committee monitoring the treatment of minority languages.
The competition drew sixteen entries, the largest field since Newport in 1988, and one of the adjudicators, Idris Reynolds, described it as the closest contest since 1976. Competing under the pen name A, Lewis submitted a poem ranging across eight centuries which the judges called “a riot of an awdl”. He was chaired in a ceremony led by the Archdruid Mererid Hopwood.
The Chair itself was made by Tomos Lewis from oak grown within the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, with fabric from the Tregwynt Woollen Mill and a bluestone emblem at its centre. The Crown had already gone earlier in the week, on 3rd August, to the veteran journalist Martin Huws. This year’s festival carried some extra historical weight: it was staged 850 years after the first recorded eisteddfod, held under the patronage of Lord Rhys at Cardigan Castle in 1176, just a few miles down the road.
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