Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2026, the Edward Cawston Thomas prize.
Criteria for The 2026 Poetry Competition
Poems, unpublished, are invited on any subject but of no more than forty lines. Closing date 20th September 2025. The judge will be the renowned poet Daljit Nagra.
Prizes:1st prize £250, two further £ 100 prizes. Up to six poems highly commended. Winners welcome to read at AGM on 1st of March at Steep, Hampshire.
Fees £5 per poem with a maximum of three poems per entrant.
Email entries: Word document, single attachment per anonymised poem ( & please mention payment method.) to Barbara Kinnes, bjkinnes@gmail.com
Fee preferably paid directly to the Fellowship’s account, 40-08-21 11250205, by bank transfer using initial and surname as Reference, “Competition” as Description, or with PayPal using one of the links below as appropriate.
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Previous years winning poems and reports follow below and via subsequent links
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 is available to read here.
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
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Highly Commended poems were – Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s ‘If I sit in a parked car listening to an owl’, Jim Green’s ‘Clean’, Iain McClure’s ‘Learning Irish’, Derek Sellen’s ‘Norfolk, 1968’, Damaris West’s ‘Navigation’, and John Wildsmith’s ‘Olanzapine’.
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Previous Years’ reports and winning poems