Hasti wins The White Review Poet’s Prize for 'fresh and alive' writing

Hasti has won £2,500 for The White Review Poet’s Prize, which was open to poets based anywhere in the world for the first time this year. 

The prize, run in partnership with CHEERIO, is for English-language poets who are creating their debut pamphlet or collection. It was founded in 2017 with support from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

This year’s judges were Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Meena Kandasamy and Deryn Rees-Jones. Of the eight-strong shortlist, Bulley said: "The poems of The White Review’s 2023 shortlist represent an impressively kaleidoscopic range of forms, influences and subject matters. The judges were taken aback by each poet’s distinct willingness to take risks, to play on the page with sound and image, and the ways that each submission foreshadowed something of a larger body of work to come."

The winner was declared at an event at Reference Point in London. Bulley added: "Hasti’s poems are watchful beings that brim with tenderness, inventiveness and wit. Seemingly just outside of time, yet hyper-present and rooted in the structural realities of the world, they speak in voices both familiar and beautifully strange, so intricately crafted yet untethered to and unburdened by form. They embody a skilful balancing act that Hasti manages with luminous grace."

Rees-Jones added: "It was a strong selection of work from which to choose, but there was unanimous agreement that Hasti’s work was beautifully made, very fresh and alive, writing to which one wanted to repeatedly return."

Lucy Mercer and Charlotte Geater are among the previous winners of the prize, which was awarded to Fahad Al-Amoudi last year.