Women Poets’ Prize announces 30-strong longlist after record number of entries

The Women Poets’ Prize has announced a 30-strong longlist selected from a record number of 910 entries.

Awarded every other year, the prize is administered by the Rebecca Swift Foundation. It aims to honour the late Swift’s two key passions of poetry and the empowerment of women, offering three women poets a programme of support and creative professional development opportunities.

All 30 longlisted poets will be granted a year’s free access to The Literary Consultancy’s Being A Writer platform, and the longlisted entries will be read by 2022 judges Penelope Shuttle, Nikita Gill and Abi Palmer.

A shortlist of nine will be announced on 14th October. The three winners will receive a £1,000 cash prize, one-to-one mentoring and coaching from The Literary Consultancy, workshops with Faber & Faber, performance coaching with national spoken word charity Apples & Snakes and more.

Each will also be matched with a poetry mentor in addition to a pastoral coach, facilitating a body of support to nurture craft and wellbeing.

Palmer said: “I live for poems that shift, rearrange, or break something inside of me. This could be through (for instance) a subtle reorganisation of ideas, an unexpected line break, or a major shift on themes – pushing out to places I wasn’t expecting to be taken. I’m not as interested in uncovering universal truths as I am in the poems which are incredibly specific, personal and strange. But none of this is gospel – more than anything I love to be surprised.”

Gill commented: “I’m looking for work that moves, surprises and holds us entranced in the moment. I am looking for core memories and stories told through verse that change the reader’s lens.”

This year the Women Poets’ Prize also announced a new one-day festival in the autumn, in partnership with the National Centre for Writing.

Taking place on 19th November at the National Centre for Writing (NCW) in Norwich Unesco City of Literature, the festival will be a fully hybrid event facilitated by spoken word and multimedia artist Paula Varjack.

The Women Poets’ Prize 2022 longlist

Aniqah Choudri
Alice Horncastle
Carol Rowntree-Jones
Zakia Carpenter-Hall
Nicky Hallett
Catherine Okoronkwo
Melanie Fordham
Scarlett Ward-Bennett
Madeleine Wurtzburger
Elizabeth Gibson
Alyson Kissner
Sonia Jarema
Laura Theis
Estelle Price
Sarah Gibbons
Elena Croitoru
Anne Gill
Ann Pelletier-Topping
Maria Isakova-Bennett
Ros Woolner
Dillon Jaxx
Olivia Tuck
Jasmine Gray
Becky Cherriman
Prerana Kumar
Amelia Loulli
Jennifer Lee Tsai
Maria Leonard
Ruth Awolola
Jeda Pearl