Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2025, the Edward Cawston Thomas prize.
The Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2025, Edward Cawston Thomas Prize: Results and Judge’s Report
We are pleased to announce the names of the winners of the 2025 Competition, judged by the award- winning poet Jane Draycott. As usual we have a First prize, with two equal Second prizes, followed by six Highly Commended poems. There were over three hundred poems entered and our thanks to everyone who entered and warm congratulations to the winners.
The three winning poems are published below with details of those Highly Commended appearing afterwards. Jane Draycott’s report on the Competition will be available in a few weeks and published on this page.
First Prize – Alesha Racine for ‘My Mother as Barn Owl’. (Alesha was in fact our winner in 2024, but the judge has no idea of who is the author of the poems she selects.)
Joint Second Prizes – Anna Bowles for Tania’s House and Anna Mindel Crawford for ‘The Anxious Ewe’.
My Mother as Barn Owl by Alesha Racine.
Tania’s House by Anna Bowles
Kherson, Ukraine, autumn 2023
The Anxious Ewe by Anna Mindel Crawford
——————————————————————-
Highly Commended poems were – Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s ‘If I sit in a parked car’, Jim Green’s ‘Clean’, Iain McClure’s ‘Learning Irish’, Derek Sellen’s ‘Norfolk, 1968’, Damaris West’s ‘Navigation’, and John Wildsmith’s ‘Olanzapine’.
———————————————————————–
Criteria for The 2025 Poetry Competition
Previous Years’ reports and winning poems