The Poetry Society has announced the winners of the 2025 competition. The three finalists were selected from 21,254 poems – each and everyone read by the panel – submitted by 9,564 entrants (were you among them?) from 133 countries across the world.
First prize went to Partridge Boswell for his poem The Gathering. Second prize went to Damen O’Brien for Axe and the Third prize to Zoe Dorado for Badminton. There were also Commendations for seven other entrants.
According to the judging panel: Susannah Dickey, Ian Duhig and Denise Saul, they were ‘blown away’ by the winning poem by American poet, Boswell: ‘It slowly unfurls, becoming an ever more expansive interrogation of language and morality’, according to Susannah Dickey.
Ian Duhig said of Axe by Australian poet O’Brien: ‘the poem struck us with the energy of its execution, its mordant humour and percussive music of its diction’. While Denise Saul, commenting on Badminton by Californian poet Dorado: ‘This is a poem of circumstances, haunted by the past and the present… Ideas of masculinity and power are pulled apart…’
All the winning poems are included in an anthology published by the Poetry Society
The next National Poetry Competition launches in June and closes 31 October, 2026.
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