Judge's comments:

“This year marks the inauguration of The Crashaw Prize, an important new venture for Salt, as we continue to discover and nurture new talent from around the English-speaking world. The prize forms part of Salt's commitment to publishing debut collections and to our vision of new literature in English as an international endeavour. It also provides proof that poetry is an art with a future — even in these financially-troubled times.

We need new writers — sometimes to entertain and surprise us, sometimes to console us, sometimes to disturb and challenge us. These books do just that, each in their own unique way. The writers also show us that poetry is both expansive and inextinguishable. Despite some claims of marginality for the art, poetry continues to have a lasting purchase on the mind and perhaps even the conscience of us all. We especially need it now.

Poetry is often at its best under pressure, the pressure of language working at its hardest, and the pressure of the poet's social and political presence in our complex and connected world, a world full of conflicts and collisions. Each of these writers is responding to these demands in fascinating and diverse ways.

Reading the hundreds of manuscripts submitted during the year was, perhaps a little unusually, a pleasure, sometimes a surprise, and it is heartening to see so much new writing focused on those tender readerly concerns of books being entertaining, readable, pleasurable, evocative, imaginative and well-constructed. As well as challenging, provocative and life-enhancing. This year's winners manage to balance all these impulses with great confidence and skill. I also believe that this year's winners provide us with damn fine reads.

We wish the writers every success in the coming year and look forward to their publication in 2009.”