UK’s top competition for young poets opens for entries
Christ Church is delighted to announce the launch of the 2026 Christopher Tower Poetry Competition, which offers the UK’s most valuable prize for young poets. The competition is free to enter and open to students between 16 and 18 years of age who are educated in the UK. This year, participants are challenged to write a poem on the theme of ‘A Riddle’.
Entries will be judged anonymously by Dr Anna Nickerson, the current Christopher Tower Student in Poetry in the English Language, alongside two guest judges – the acclaimed poets Fiona Benson and Matthew Hollis.
Fiona Benson is a poet, teacher and mother whose four celebrated collections are all published by Cape. Her second collection, Vertigo & Ghost won the Forward Prize, while her first three were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her most recent book, Midden Witch, was the Poetry Book Society’s choice for Summer 2025. Recent work has included editing translations of Ukrainian poetry and writing a script for the Belgian dance company Ultima Vez. She recently served as a Seamus Heaney Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Matthew Hollis is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2011) – winner of the Costa Biography Award – and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022), a book of the year in the Financial Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times. Ground Water, a poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award (2004), while Earth House was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry (2023). He is co-editor of The Poems of Seamus Heaney (2025).
This year’s theme is an invitation to explore the ways in which poetry makes the everyday strange.
This year’s theme is an invitation to explore the ways in which poetry makes the everyday strange.
Reflecting on this year’s theme, Dr Anna Nickerson writes: ‘Riddle me, riddle me, riddle me ree. Riddles are an ancient form of poetry, found throughout the classical and folk literatures of the world; some of the oldest poems in English are riddles. Some riddles are jokes while others offer wise counsel, some conceal their meaning while others aim to be understood, but the essence of a riddle, as Aristotle put it, is that it “expresses true facts under impossible conditions”. This year’s theme is an invitation to explore the ways in which poetry makes the everyday strange. We look forward to seeing how this year’s entrants interpret the challenge.’
The competition has a first prize of £5,000, with 12 additional winners and commended poets also receiving cash prizes. The top three winners will also be offered a place on the Tower Poetry Summer School, a residential course led by esteemed poets and tutors. Previous winning poems can be read here.
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