“It means the world to me to win the Foyle Young Poets award. I have been writing for a very long time – privately, always hunched over the family computer, letting my ideas meander onto the document,” one of this year’s Foyle Young Poets top 15 winners, Evie Lockwood, said. Twelve-year-old Evie, from Swindon, added: “Now I have the courage to show everyone my voice; to demonstrate that I am worthy of being listened to and that there are many in the world willing to listen.”

Another top 15 winner, Isaac Meredith, aged 17, from Folkestone, said: “Beyond the validation of having your work read and approved of, the Foyle Young Poets award lets you meet other writers. Poetry can be quite an insular activity; the experience of meeting peers who are equally passionate, and encounter similar joys of, and difficulties with writing is so valuable to me. It reassured  me that people my age take poetry seriously.”

The Poetry Society announced the top 15 winners and 85 commended poets in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award 2024 at a special celebration at the British  Library, London. Run by the Poetry Society since 1998 and supported by the Foyle Foundation, the award is one of the leading writing competitions for young people aged 11-17, with  17,000 poems from over 6,600 young poets entered into the competition.

This year’s judges Vanessa Kisuule and Jack Underwood selected 100 winners, made up of 15 top poets and 85 commended poets.  Poet, performer and slam champion Vanessa Kisuule said: “I had a glimmer of intrigue as I read the first line of each entry: where might this poem take me? This year’s entries took me to many wondrous and unexpected places. I loved the poems that were playful with form and language and the poems that stood in humble awe at the beauty of nature. Some poems made me cackle and others made my stomach twist in recognition with the pain and struggle they depicted. Jack and I were awestruck at how precocious and assured these poets are.”

Fellow judge, poet, writer and critic Jack Underwood described judging the poems as “a genuinely restorative experience: to see so many poems  written by young people, while initially daunting, reassured me that poetry is healthier than ever, and continues to lure  fresh minds into its weird, millennia-old conversation.

“I was impressed by those poets replying to the older, more formally regular traditions, and how deftly they managed things like metre and rhyme, but also by those poets finding new  shapes, structures and cadences for their concerns: most of all I was impressed by how imaginatively and wholeheartedly  these poets ventured into the world, asked questions, and replied to it: with tenderness, social conscience, and novelty of thought and phrase. Vanessa and I were moved to laughter, to gasps of surprise, and (rarest of all for us two) to silence.  I had a blast!” 

The top 15 poems will be published in a printed winners’ anthology (also available online) from March 2025.  The 85 commended poems will appear in an online anthology.

The Top 15 Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2024, are:

Isaac Meredith, 17, Folkestone; Indy Moon, 18 (17 at the time of entry), Castle Point, Essex; Adrien Sevaux,17, Kensington and Chelsea, London; Tasha Yang, 16, Winchester; Juliana Xinwen Pan,14, Bellevue, Washington, US;  Idris Scrase, 17, Oxford; Freya Beer, 18 (17 at the time of entry), Croydon; Meredith Wade, 17, Sedbergh, Cumbria; Ernest Wakeford, 15, Ditchling, Sussex; Rina Olsen, 17, Guam, US; Evie Lockwood, 12, Swindon; Yousef Alawi, 17, Rugby; Holly Hellman, 17, Hammersmith and Fulham, London; Grace Bowen, 15, Southport; Charlie Jolley, 17, Sheffield.

PHOTOGRAPH: HAYLEY MADDEN