writing – Lisa Kelly

British Sign Language poets shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry

News from The Bookseller https://www.thebookseller.com/news/british-sign-language-poets-shortlisted-for-the-forward-prizes-for-poetry

Jul 17, 2025

by Melina Spanoudi

Raymond Antrobus and Zoë McWhinney have been shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prizes for Poetry; this is the first year the prize has been open to poems performed in British Sign Language. Deaf poet McWhinney is shortlisted for her poem, The portrait and the Skylight, while Antrobus is on the list for Dynamic Disks.

This year’s shortlists feature poems on toxic relationships, border crossings, faith and colonialism, gentrification and sexuality.

The prizes are awarded in four categories, comprising the £10,000 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the £5,000 Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, the £1,000 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written and the £1,000 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed. The winners will be announced at a ceremony held at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday 26th October 2025.

Independent presses continue to demonstrate their importance in the poetry landscape with eight out of the 10 collections published by indie publishers. In The Forward Prize for Best Collection category, Juana Adcock is shortlisted for I Sugar the Bones (Out-Spoken Press), alongside Niall Campbell, on the list for The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe Books). In The Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection category, Catherine-Esther Cowie is shortlisted for Heirloom (Carcanet Press) and Isabelle Baafi is shortlisted for Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber).

This year’s judging panel, chaired by Sarah Hall, comprised poets and writers Lisa Kelly, Sean O’Brien, Rommi Smith and Hannah Lavery.

Lavery said the four Forward Prize shortlists demonstrate how poetry “can be the rallying call; the necessary challenge and the stark provocation; the rage and the grief; and the beauty of connection and hope”.

Meanwhile, Hall highlighted “the creative renewal of forms alongside innovation”, and Smith said the “eclectic shortlists” featured poems are as “much tender and introspective, as bold and bawdy; as much musical and lyrical, as prosaic and political”.

Mónica Parle, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, added: “The judges gave the reading time and attention, and they took such care and shared great passion when discussing the work. It has resulted in a groundbreaking year for the Forward Prizes, with two British Sign Language poets shortlisted for the first time in the Best Single Poem – Performed category (itself still a groundbreaking endeavour on the national awards stage). We are indebted to the advice of judge Lisa Kelly in helping broaden the scope of submissions.”

O’Brien said: “What was I looking for among the Forward Prize entries? Imagination, formal skill, music, commitment to language. I hoped to encounter poems able to resist the lure of attitudinising and merely immediate relevance. I hoped to find poems that accept the obligation of the poet to make work that endures and renews itself for successive readers and listeners. I’m delighted to say that such work was there to be found, both among established poets and newcomers.”

The Forward Prize for Best Collection

I Sugar the Bones by Juana Adcock (Out-Spoken Press)

Southernmost: Sonnets by Leo Boix (Chatto & Windus)

The Island in the Sound by Niall Campbell (Bloodaxe Books)

Avidyā by Vidyan Ravinthiran (Bloodaxe Books)

Wellwater by Karen Solie (Picador)

The Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection

Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali (The 87 Press)

Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi (Faber & Faber)

Heirloom by Catherine-Esther Cowie (Carcanet Press)

Altar by Desree (Batt Betty)

Goonie by Michael Mullen (Corsair)

The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written

At Least by Abeer Ameer

Birds of the Arctic by Simon Armitage

A Parliament of Jets by Tom Branfoot

Girl Ghosts by Tim Tim Cheng

Codex© by Nick Makoha

The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed

Dynamic Disks by Raymond Antrobus

Sikiliza by Bella Cox

Where I’m From by Griot Gabriel

Mum Does the Washing by Joshua Idehen

The Portrait and the Skylight by Zoë McWhinney

Six poems from ‘Scavenger’ by Lisa Kelly

Lisa writes: The Scavenger project relies on the acrostic form to record my regular walks around the Darlands Nature Reserve near where I live in north London. The garden centre I pass on the two-hour circuit occasionally fills a crate with unwanted plants to ‘take for free’ – what I find, I plant. Sometimes there is something to plant; sometimes, nothing; and sometimes some weird things that wouldn’t do well in the earth, but I take them home if I can carry them and see how they might be put to use in my rather rough-and-ready back garden. Other observations about how the reserve responds to the seasons and a record of the times we live in, inevitably weave their way into the nine-line poems as walking goes hand-in-hand with rumination. I plan to continue diarising until the end of August to complete the cycle, and possibly beyond.

12/08/24

Saturdays and Sundays, the garden centre is normally
crowded. Gardeners, families, dogs and day-outers
advancing on plants as a weekend tonic, a welcome
variation from stuffy homes or a fake-fern office
environment, and their energy and enthusiasm to spend
normally means Monday morning is a good time to
garner some unsold, cleared out, knocked-about plants.
Evidently, this Monday morning, I’m wrong. The crate
reveals nothing except that it’s lined with plastic grass.

4/09/24

September’s not a fruitful month – nothing in the
crate again, except a label for a tomato plant, called
‘Ailsa Craig’ – identifier detached from what it identified:
vegetable by nutritionists; flower by botanists. It boasts
‘exceptional flavour and classic tomato aroma’ – only
notionally, there’s no evidence of this ‘TRIED and TESTED
garden favourite’. Home, I plant the label in a sunny spot,
enacting instructions. I can imagine the tomato growing –
removing leaves for circulation: tending to an ‘airy nothing’.

23/09/24

Saw a plastic tray of begonias going for ‘just £3’ and
consciously decided not to ask the garden centre’s manager
about what time roughly they might decide to de-
value them to worthless and dump them in the crate. Despite the
expedition being fruitless, there are rules to follow –
not knowing keeps the project alive and where’s the
gratification in turning up for blighted begonias with no
expectation of disappointment? Perhaps I have
reduced Fortune’s Wheel to this – to prevent riskier punts.

28/10/24

So, with the end of British Summer Time,
clocks going back and a tractor ploughing
arable land while a TEREX digger tries to
vroom up the narrow hedge-lined path –
everything seems intent on going
north or south, forwards or backwards,
getting ahead or behind some marker but I’m
enlivened by the pot of bronze sedge grass
resisting time: not quite dying, not quite living.

2/12/24

after John Burnside

Scores of fir trees cut down and waiting to be one of the chosen.
Christmas is upon us with the drive to buy something festive – since
August almost. You could accuse me of exaggeration, but the deep
veneration for Father Capitalism keeps us in mind of our duties,
especially when we are least receptive or liable to play truant in the fields.
Nocturnes. Why do I think of endings when it’s a celebration of birth?
Guests at a gathering are just guests. Even kings walk into the dark,
exchanging pleasantries before leave-taking, getting on with their lives
regal or otherwise. The trees remain like sentinels, stoic and watching.

8/01/2025

Sideways sign for Christmas opening times
collapsed on the crate and partly hidden by an
array of bins ready for collection – grimy black,
vulgar orange and dull green. No plants to
entice my scavenging fingers and any
New Year hope for a little something like
green shoots to get the sap rising is dangerously
ersatz emotion – a substitute for offering
restitution to the earth: digging down and dirty.

Tag: writing

British Sign Language poets shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry

Six SCAVENGER poems on Wild Court

Six poems from ‘Scavenger’ by Lisa Kelly