A Poetic Achievement

Congratulations to Year 12 pupil Dawn who has been named in as one of the top 15 winners of The Poetry Society and Foyle Young 
Poets of the Year Award 2023. This is a fantastic achievement with over 6,600 young people entering the competition from across the world.

Dawn's entry 'the world viewed at 73mph' can be read below.

Young poets travelled from all across the UK to take to the stage of the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse with The Poetry Society. Friends, family, educators and literary experts heard reflections from the judges, listened to readings from the Foyle Award’s top 15 writers and celebrated the future of poetry.

Run by The Poetry Society and generously supported by the Foyle Foundation, this has been an exciting 25th year for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. Since 1998, the Award has been finding, celebrating and supporting the very best young poets from across the UK and internationally. The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is firmly established as one of the leading competitions in the world for young poets aged between 11 and 17 years old.

An amazing 15,800 poems from 6,600 young people were entered. Young people from 119 countries entered the competition from as far afield as Romania, Trinidad and Tobago, Vietnam and New Zealand, as well as the four corners of the UK. Entries were received from every postcode area in England, and from throughout Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

From these poems this year’s judges Jonathan Edwards and Jane Yeh selected 100 winners, made up of 15 top poets and 85 commended poets.

Winners of the award receive a fantastic range of prizes to help develop their writing. All the winners will receive further mentoring opportunities. As on of the top 15 poets, Dawn will be invited to attend a residential writing course at the Arvon Centre, The Hurst in Shropshire, where she will be able to spend a week with this year’s judges, Jonathan and Jane, focusing on improving their poetry and establishing a community of writers. 

The top 15 poems will be published in a printed winners’ anthology (also available online) from March 2024. The 85 commended poems will appear in an online anthology. Both anthologies showcase the talent of the winners and are widely distributed for free to schools, libraries, reading groups and poetry lovers across the UK and the world.

Where is that statistic, that we all know
but most forget, about the primary causes of death
and how daily we relive that sentence?
We blur past the world in our capsule. At the base of a cloud
there is a conjunction of heaven and earth:
they are clustered by the gods over the horizon
like hills shadowed against darkening skies, and across eternal fields
the pylons are tattoos. They are vast. They are cities of steel
bound by tightropes, and there is us, gliding across the highway
miles below in clammy cold. The heavens are too far;
the rain is falling, and we must keep our minds
far away from our sentence. Cat’s eyes: they are wise,
they are watching, they have seen things.
A swerve. The orange flash
of an indicator light, and we slow down,
we have

escaped the inevitable. But when I step
out of the capsule into the smell of the night
the second-floor window is dizzyingly high
and a single telegraph wire
arches its way across the sky.