Poetry Wales Award 2025-26 | The Shortlist
Get to know the shortlisted poets and buy your ticket for our Awarding Ceremony
Get to know the shortlisted poets and buy your ticket for our Awarding Ceremony
“The Iowa River was right there before me. Like all rivers it has a history. It was no leap to think about the way we treat performers and natural resources.”
“Perhaps that’s what this poem is about: the many-dimensional reality in which we live as adults as opposed to the constraints of a childhood in which we are operating on different brain wave lengths.”
“I am a traditionalist and work hard to keep the meaning very close to the original while also echoing the sounds and rhythms of the original.”
“‘Dirty Laundry’ deals with nostalgia, memory, and the passage of time, but if I were to sum it up in one word, I’d say – hiraeth, a word any Welsh expat knows well.”
“Even out there at the tip of the Llyn peninsula, with Bardsey Sound beneath me, the bleakness of our environmental predicament felt inescapable. I envied [Plath] not writing under that weight.”
Content warning: mention of suicide