22/11/2022
The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2022 winners have been announced! Discover this year's top 100 winners here: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/foyle-young-poets-of-the-year-award/
More than 6,600 poets aged 11-17 submitted over 13,500 poems into this year’s competition. Young people from 100 countries entered the competition from as far afield as Nepal, Panama and Serbia, and 98 percent of postcodes in the UK.
This year’s poet-judges Anthony Anaxagorou and Mona Arshi had a difficult job choosing the top 100 winners, with Anthony saying, “The extraordinary range and breadth of the writing in this year’s Foyle Young Poets competition slowed our reading down, asked us to inhabit a pool of poetics and voices, while encouraging us to think about tomorrow’s poetry in fresh and innovative ways.”
Judge Mona Arshi added, “It was both a pleasure and a privilege to judge this year’s Foyle competition. We were impressed by the sheer variety of approaches as well the diversity of forms employed… Many poems we encountered vibrated with truth and wonder, so many poems employed a slant glaze to arrive at a simple universal emotional truth.”
Huge congratulations to the top 100 winning poets, and to everyone who sent their poem into the competition this year. You created something new and shared it with us - that's something to be proud of! We hope you'll keep writing and reading poetry. Next year's competition launches in March - until then, you can get involved in Young Poets Network for anyone aged 25 or younger, with regular writing challenges, features, new poems by young people and more: ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk
