UK’s top competition for young poets opens for entries

The competition is judged anonymously by two guest judges and the Christopher Tower Student in Poetry in the English Language. This year, the Christopher Tower Student, Dr Anna Nickerson, will be joined as judge by Liz Berry and Vona Groarke.

Liz Berry is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed collections Black Country (Chatto, 2014); The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018); and The Home Child (Chatto, 2023), a novel in verse. Liz’s work, described as “a sooty soaring hymn to her native West Midlands” (Guardian), celebrates the landscape, history and dialect of the region. Liz has received the Somerset Maugham Award, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Writers' Prize and two Forward Prizes. Her poem ‘Homing’, a love poem for the language of the Black Country, is part of the GCSE English syllabus.  

Vona Groarke is Ireland Professor of Poetry (2025-28). She has published fifteen books, including nine collections of poetry with Gallery Press, most recently, Infinity Pool, shortlisted for the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize. Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara (NYUP, 2022) - a response to the lives of Irish emigrant domestic servants in 1890s New York which arose out of her time as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018-19 - won the 2024 Michel Déon Prize. 2017 Recipient of the Irish Literary Hall of Fame, she is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Society of Literature and of Aosdána, the Irish Academy of the Arts. She was Writer in Residence (2022-26) at St John's College, Cambridge.

Dr. Anna Nickerson writes of this year’s theme: "What if a poem were able to summon things from the deep? Might it call up one of those mysterious creatures that lie fathoms down in the darkness of ocean, cosmos, or psyche? Might we think of a poem as a kind of shoreline or asteroid belt or waking mind, a place where the detritus of the deep – its flotsam and jetsam, its rubble and space-junk, its dreams and preconscious terrors – end up? Might a poem sing with the kind of song that is heard beneath the waves? Or might it make audible an ancient signal sent from the alien limits of the universe?"

The competition has a first prize of £5,000, with twelve additional winners and commended poets also receiving cash prizes. The top three winners are also given a place on the Tower Poetry Summer School, a poetry residential course with esteemed tutors. Previous winning poems can be read here.