2026 Winners

We are celebrating poetry in its many guises and it has been a pleasure to be this year’s judge.  Hailing from Guyana and experiencing migration to Britain many decades ago, Guernsey appealed to me and drew me in, initially as a place of dramatic coasts and crossings and more recently, as a rich place of heritage and people with stories to tell.

I was keenly surprised and cheered by the sheer number of poems sent in. Plenty plenty plenty poems.  It has been a pleasure to read them and thank you to all who took the time to write them.

We need poetry in our lives not just for entertainment or catharsis, also to have the experience of others. Of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes. It is too an opportunity for connection. Some poems, in addition to those that evoked nature, place, family, Guernsey and more, have offered opportunities for this. A sense of collective spirit and poetic protest, which in these challenging times, offers possibility for the ‘we’ in Guernsey life and culture. 

I was heartened by the high-quality range of poems by children.  It speaks to our futures, with hope.

As a judge, I have had to make hard decisions.  I commend the winning entries for their craft and powerful images and sentiments and at the same time there have been many more poems that interested and inspired me. I would have liked to have chosen more.  That the poems will be displayed in the coming months is music to my ears. I imagine poems cascading around Guernsey and am looking forward to seeing them displayed on buses, at the airport and ferry terminal. I hope you enjoy the poems and are encouraged to write your own.

Keep writing, reading and word exploring!