Eric Gregory Awards

Joanne Harris (left) and Lemn Sissay (right) with 2022 Eric Gregory Awards winners Joe Carrick-Varty, Rhiya Pau, Jack Cooper, Daniella Fearon, Courtney Conrad, Maisie Newman and Stephanie Sy-Quia at Southwark Cathedral (photograph © Adrian Pope)
Joanne Harris (left) and Lemn Sissay (right) with 2022 Eric Gregory Awards winners Joe Carrick-Varty, Rhiya Pau, Jack Cooper, Daniella Fearon, Courtney Conrad, Maisie Newman and Stephanie Sy-Quia at Southwark Cathedral (photograph © Adrian Pope)
For a collection by poets under the age of 30

The Eric Gregory Awards, for a collection by poets under the age of 30, were founded in 1960 by the late Dr Eric Gregory for the encouragement of young poets.

Winners of the Eric Gregory Awards are invited to a free solo week residency at Thomas Cottage. Part of a historic farmhouse in the Lake District hamlet of Hartsop, the cottage is in a beautiful location in the rising fells just south of Ullswater. The house is generously reserved for poets who have won an Eric Gregory Award, usually in the January and February following their Award.

The 2024 Eric Gregory Awards have now closed for submissions.


The 2023 Eric Gregory Award Winners


Princess Arinola Adegbite for Algorithms of Meaning
Jay Gao for Imperium
Mukahang Limbu for Mother of Flip-Flops
Momtaza Mehri for Bad Diaspora Poems
Helen Quah for Dog Woman
Charlotte Shevchenko Knight for food for the dead

‘It was a huge pleasure to be confronted by a varied and talented list in this year’s awards. What this suggested for me was a new cohort of emerging voices with a keen sense of what’s at stake in this cultural moment, a willingness to engage with troubling and complex subject areas, and a largely self-reflexive capacity to interrogate the self. My own imagination and proficiency as a reader was stretched again and again.’
Wayne Holloway-Smith, 2023 Eric Gregory Award judge


With thanks, the judges of the 2023 Eric Gregory Award:

Raymond Antrobus

© Suki Dhanda

MBE FRSL was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of Shapes & Disfigurements (Burning Eye, 2012) To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press, 2017), The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins / Tin House, 2018) and All The Names Given (Picador / Tin House, 2021). In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes Award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year Award, Somerset Maugham Award and The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for The Griffin Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem Sound Machine. Also in 2019 and 2021 his poems (Jamaican British, The Perseverance and Happy Birthday Moon) was added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus.

Wayne Holloway-Smith

© Mark Sherratt

Wayne Holloway-Smith is an award winning poet from London. He won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2017 and the National Poetry Competition in 2018. He has published two books of poetry and three pamphlets. His debut collection, ALARUM (Bloodaxe Books 2017), was shortlisted for the Roehampton Prize for Best Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Best First Collection. LOVE MINUS LOVE (Bloodaxe Books 2020), a book-length poem, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He has appeared on Radio 4’s The Echo Chamber and Blast, Radio 3’s The Verb, Radio 6’s Cillian Murphy Show, and is a regular contributor to BBC London’s The Robert Elm’s Show. He lectures at the University of Hertfordshire.

Sarah Howe

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She is a Lecturer in Poetry at King’s College London.

© Edward Brown

Gwyneth Lewis

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005-06. She wrote the bilingual words for the front of the iconic Wales Millennium Centre. She’s an award-winning poet. Her most recent collection is Sparrow Tree (Bloodaxe Books). She has published seventeen books of poetry, non-fiction and, with Rowan Williams, a translation of The Book of Taliesin (Penguin Classics). Gwyneth was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2010. She’s a freelance writer and teacher and has held a number of fellowships in the US, where she’s taught at Princeton University and is a faculty member of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont where, in 2016 she was the Robert Frost Chair of Literature. 

Eric Ngalle Charles

© Billie Charity

Eric Ngalle Charles is a Cameroonian writer, poet and playwright, and human rights activist based in Wales. A Ph.D. researcher at King’s College London, he was awarded a Creative Wales Award Fellowship in 2017 for his work on the topics of migration, trauma, and memory. His autobiography I, Eric Ngalle: One Man’s Journey Crossing Continents from Africa to Europe (2019) was published by Parthian Books, and recounts his journey to Europe, spending several years in Russia and elsewhere seeking refuge. He was selected as one of Jackie Kay’s best British BAME writers with a unique theatrical voice. He sits on boards at Literature Wales and Aberystwyth Arts Centre and edited Hiraeth Erzolirzoli: A Wales-Cameroon Anthology (2018). The 3 Molas (2020), an anthology about Cameroon and Wales. His poetry Collection Homelands Seren Books (2022) was published in April.

Joelle Taylor

© Roman Manfredi

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who prior to the pandemic completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of 4 collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet. Her new poetry collection C+NTO & Othered Poems was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. 

http://joelletaylor.co.uk/ 

2023

  • Princess Arinola Adegbite for Algorithms of Meaning
  • Jay Gao for Imperium
  • Mukahang Limbu for Mother of Flip-Flops
  • Momtaza Mehri for Bad Diaspora Poems
  • Helen Quah for Dog Woman
  • Charlotte Shevchenko Knight for food for the dead

2022

  • Joe Carrick-Varty for Sky Doc
  • Courtney Conrad for Revelations
  • Jack Cooper for Break the Nose of Every Beautiful Thing
  • Daniella Fearon for Beyond the Monochrome Lens
  • Maisie Newman for Our Names Were Oil
  • Rhiya Pau for Routes
  • Stephanie Sy-Quia for Amnion

2021

  • Phoebe Walker
  • Michael Askew
  • Goboyega Odubanjo
  • Kandace Siobahn Walker
  • Cynthia Miller
  • Milena Williamson
  • Dominic Hand

2020

  • Amina Jama
  • Kadish Morris
  • Natalie Linh Bolderston
  • Roseanne Watt
  • Susanah Dickey

2019

  • Mary Jean Chan
  • Sophie Collins
  • Seán Hewitt
  • Dominic Leonard
  • James Conor Patterson
  • Phoebe Stuckes

2018

  • Zohar Atkins
  • Victoria Adukwei Bulley
  • Jenna Clake
  • Joseph Eastell
  • Annie Katchinska
  • Ali Lewis/ Stephen Sexton

2017

  • Rachael Allen
  • Isabel Galleymore
  • Daisy Lafarge
  • Richard O’Brien
  • Richard Osmond
  • Mark Pajak

2016

  • Sam Buchan-Watts
  • Dom Bury
  • Jen Campbell
  • Alex MacDonald
  • Andrew McMillan

2015

  • Rowan Evans
  • Miriam Nash
  • Padraig Regan
  • Stewart Sanderson
  • Andrew Wynn Owen

2014

  • Sophie Collins
  • Emily Hasler (Lorrie Scott)
  • Martha Sprackland
  • Chloe Stopa-Hunt
  • David Tait

2013

  • John Clegg
  • Kate Gething-Smith
  • Matt Haw
  • Oli Hazzard

2012

  • Sophie Baker
  • Joey Connolly
  • Holly Corfield Carr
  • Caleb Klaces
  • Rachael Madeleine Nicholas
  • Phoebe Power
  • Jon Stone

2011

  • Niall Campbell
  • Tom Chivers
  • Holly Hopkins
  • Martin Jackson
  • Kim Moore

2010

  • Phil Brown
  • Matthew Gregory
  • Sarah Howe
  • Abigail Parry
  • Ahren Warner

2009

  • Liz Berry
  • James Brookes
  • Swithun Cooper
  • Alex McRae
  • Sam Riviere

2008

  • Emily Berry
  • Rhiannon Hooson
  • James Midgley
  • Adam O’Riordan
  • Heather Phillipson

2007

  • Rachel Curzon
  • Miriam Gamble
  • Michael McKimm
  • Helen Mort
  • Jack Underwood

2006

  • Fiona Benson
  • Retta Bowen
  • Frances Leviston
  • Jonathan Morley
  • Eoghan Walls

2005

  • Melanie Challenger
  • Carolyn Jess
  • Luke Kennard
  • Toby Martinez De Las Rivas

2004

  • Nick Laird
  • Elizabeth Manuel
  • Abi Curtis
  • Sophie Mayer
  • Saradha Soobrayen

2003

  • Jen Hadfield
  • Zoe Brigley
  • Paul Batchelor
  • Olivia Cole
  • Sasha Dugdale
  • Anna Woodford

2002

  • Caroline Bird
  • Christopher James
  • Jacob Polley
  • Luke Heeley
  • Judith Lal
  • David Leonard Briggs
  • Eleanor Rees
  • Kathryn Simmonds

2001

  • Leontia Flynn
  • Thomas Warner
  • Tishani Doshi
  • Patrick Mackie
  • Kathryn Gray
  • Sally Read

2000

  • Eleanor Margolies
  • Antony Rowland
  • Antony Dunn
  • Karen Goodwin
  • Clare Pollard

1999

  • Ross Cogan
  • Matthew Hollis
  • Helen Ivory
  • Andrew Pidoux
  • Owen Sheers
  • Dan Wyke

1998

  • Mark Goodwin
  • Joanne Limburg
  • Patrick McGuinness
  • Kona Macphee
  • Esther Morgan
  • Christiania Whitehead
  • Frances Williams

1997

  • Matthew Clegg
  • Sarah Corbett
  • Polly Clark
  • Tim Kendal
  • Graham Nelson
  • Matthew Welton

1996

  • Sue Butler
  • Cathy Cullis
  • Jane Griffiths
  • Jane Holland
  • Chris Jones
  • Sinead Morrissey
  • Kate Thomas

1995

  • Colette Bryce
  • Sophie Hannah
  • Tobias Hill
  • Mark Wormald

1994

  • Julia Copus
  • Alice Oswald
  • Steven Blyth
  • Kate Clanchy
  • Giles Goodland

1993

  • Eleanor Brown
  • Joel Lane
  • Deryn Rees-Jones
  • Sean Boustead
  • Tracey Herd
  • Angela McSeveney

1992

  • Jill Dawson
  • Hugh Dunkerley
  • Christopher Greenhalgh
  • Marita Maddah
  • Stuart Paterson
  • Stuart Pickford

1991

  • Roddy Lumsden
  • Glyn Maxwell
  • Stephen Smith
  • Wayne Burrows
  • Jackie Kay

1990

  • Nicholas Drake
  • Maggie Hannan
  • William Park
  • Jonathan Davidson
  • Lavinia Greenlaw
  • Don Paterson
  • John Wells

1989

  • Gerard Woodward
  • David Morley
  • Katrina Porteous
  • Paul Henry

1988

  • Michael Symmons Roberts
  • Gwyneth Lewis
  • Adrian Blackledge
  • Simon Armitage
  • Robert Crawford

1987

  • Peter McDonald
  • Maura Dooley
  • Stephen Knight
  • Steve Anthony
  • Jill Maughan
  • Paul Munden

1986

  • Mick North
  • Lachlan Mackinnon
  • Oliver Reynolds
  • Stephen Romer

1985

  • Graham Mort
  • Adam Thorpe
  • Pippa Little
  • James Harpur
  • Simon North
  • Julian May

1984

  • Martyn Crucefix
  • Mick Imlah
  • Jamie McKendrick
  • Bill Smith
  • Carol Ann Duffy
  • Christopher Meredith
  • Peter Armstrong
  • Iain Bamforth

1983

  • Martin Stokes
  • Hilary Davies
  • Michael O’Neill
  • Lisa St Aubin De Teran
  • Deidre Shanahan

1982

  • Steve Ellis
  • Jeremy Reed
  • Alison Brackenbury
  • Neil Astley
  • Chris O’Neill
  • Joseph Bristow
  • John Gibbens
  • James Lasdun

1981

  • Alan Jenkins
  • Simon Rae
  • Marion Lomax
  • Philip Gross
  • Kathleen Jamie
  • Mark Abley
  • Roger Crowley
  • Ian Gregson

1980

  • Robert Minhinnick
  • Michael Hulse
  • Blake Morrison
  • Medbh McGuckian

1979

  • Stuart Henson
  • Michael Jenkins
  • Alan Hollinghurst
  • Sean O’Brien
  • Peter Thabit Jones
  • James Lindesay
  • Walter Perrie
  • Brian Moses

1978

  • Ciaran Carson
  • Peter Denman
  • Christopher Reid
  • Paul Wilkins
  • Martyn A. Ford
  • James Sutherland-Smith

1977

  • Tony Flynn
  • Michael Vince
  • David Cooke
  • Douglas Marshall
  • Melissa Murray

1976

  • Stewart Brown
  • Valerie Gillies
  • Paul Groves
  • Paul Hyland
  • Nigel Jenkins
  • Andrew Motion
  • Tom Paulin
  • William Peskett

1975

  • John Birtwhistle
  • Duncan Bush
  • Val Warner
  • Philip Holmes
  • Peter Cash
  • Alasdair Paterson

1974

  • Duncan Forbes
  • Roger Garfitt
  • Robin Hamilton
  • Frank Ormsby
  • Penelope Shuttle

1973

  • John Beynon
  • Ian Caws
  • James Fenton
  • Keith Harris
  • David Howarth
  • Philip Pacey

1972

  • Tony Curtis
  • Richard Burns
  • Brian Oxley
  • Andrew Greig
  • Robin Lee
  • Paul Muldoon

1971

  • Martin Booth
  • Florence Bull
  • John Pook
  • D.M. Warman
  • John Welch

1970

  • Helen Frye
  • Paul Mills
  • John Mole
  • Brian Morse
  • Alan Perry
  • Richard Tibbitts

1969

  • Gavin Bantock
  • Jeremy Hooker
  • Jenny King
  • Neil Powell
  • Landeg E. White

1968

  • James Aitchison
  • Douglas Dunn
  • Brian Jones

1967

  • Angus Calder
  • Marcus Cumberlege
  • David Harsent
  • David Selzer
  • Brian Patten

1966

  • Robin Fulton
  • Seamus Heaney
  • Hugo Williams

1965

  • John Fuller
  • Derek Mahon
  • Michael Longley
  • Norman Talbot

1964

  • Robert Nye
  • Ken Smith
  • Jean Symons
  • Ted Walker

1963

  • Ian Hamilton
  • Stewart Conn
  • Peter Griffith
  • David Wevill

1962

  • Donald Thomas
  • James Simmons
  • Brian Johnson
  • Jenny Joseph

1961

  • Adrian Mitchell
  • Geoffrey Hill

1960

  • Christopher Levenson
Dr. Eric Gregory © Leeds University Library

Dr. Eric Craven Gregory

Dr. Eric Gregory, also known as Peter Gregory, (6 October 1887–1959) was a publisher and benefactor of modern art and artists. Gregory was the director of the Burlington Magazine and chairman of art publishers Percy Lund, Humphries & Co. Ltd. and the Ganymed Press. Before the war he mixed in Surrealist circles, publishing their work. In 1946 he was a member of the organising committee of the Museum of Modern Art. Together with Peter Watson, Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, he founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), generously assisting its financing, and he was on its management committee. He funded some original and successful resident fellowships at Leeds University for young artists, musicians and poets. In his will, his left a few of his collection of pictures and sculptures to the Tate Gallery, money to be invested in trust for the benefit of the ICA, and the residue to form a trust fund to provide the Eric Gregory Awards for the benefit and encouragement of young British poets.


Charity number 261451