Two KES Poets Among the Winners in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award

News reached KES this week that poems by two of the School’s Senior School poets were among the top 100 entries in this year’s prestigious Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2022. More than 6,600 poets aged 11-17 submitted over 13,500 poems into this year’s competition, which attracted entries from as far afield as Nepal and Panama!

Elise Withey and Georgia-Mae Tan joined the winning poets at London’s National Theatre earlier this month, at the first in-person ceremony for the Award since 2019, after their respective poems, Portrait of a Dying Man, Untitled and July’s Peonies were recognised by the judges as being among the very best entries.

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.”