2024 Ten-liners competition Results
PREVIOUS COMPETITIONS
Open Competition 2025 Results
FIRST PRIZE: ‘After the Calving’ by Ilse Pedler
SECOND PRIZE: ‘Roughly the Same’ by Vanessa Lampert
THIRD PRIZE: ‘Bus’ by Mark Totterdell
Winning and selected poems published in the competition anthology.
Adjudicator: Merryn Williams
Highly Commended:
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‘The Swallows have Returned to the Barn’ by Thea Smiley
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‘Way to go’ by Richard Side
Commended:
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‘High Fliers’ by Alison Allen
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‘How I do the grieving a few years on’ by Kathy Pimlott
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‘My mum accidently leaves me a seven-minute message on WhatsApp’ by Jeanette Burton
Selected:
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‘What Mothers Do’ by Sam Szanto
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‘Who Lives Behind this Door’ Laura Jenner
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‘Lately, she’s been seeing things differently’ by Evie Salmon
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‘Lycopodium’ by Helen Overell
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‘Time of Day’ by Damen O’Brien
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‘Grievance’ by Ian Heffernan
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‘Porch With Weathered Angels’ by Ian Royce Chamberlain
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‘The Lavant’ by Chris Hardy
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‘Postcard from Poland’ by Jenny Hodson
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‘Shaving an old Friend’s Head for the First Time’ by Peter Raynard
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‘No Q and A’ by Adrian Buckner
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‘Another day, placed like a gift at the door of dawn’ by Julia Stothard
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‘ The Gatecrashers’ by Christopher Horton
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‘Signage’ by Elsa Braekkan Payne
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‘You feel it all’ by Rachael Hill
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‘hummingbird | spaceman | boy’ by Mary Mulholland
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‘Facing It’ by Siobhan Ward
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‘Between Stations’ by Howard Wright
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‘The Constitutional’ Howard Wright
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‘The foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ by Derek Coe
Ten-liners competition 2025 Results
Winning and selected poems published in the competition anthology.
Adjudicator: Cynthia Kitchen
FIRST PRIZE: John Hussey
Missing Glove
A red blur spiked on a railing,
raised in mute appeal on the headlong street.
I picture the owner getting home, patting pockets, swearing.
She enters the blameless lounge. The armchair stands
She lays the survivor in a bedroom drawer as if the other might return,
scurry over tarmac, steal through a window, tip-finger up the stairs.
But it’s still there when I walk home along the weft of pavements.
Maybe at night the lost gloves of London fly up, flock, swoop over rooftops
while their owners and finders sleep, joined by the delicate threads
that cross dense postcodes, run silent down empty high-hedged lanes.
SECOND PRIZE: Louise Walker
Russell Hobbs
The witness who knows all your secrets,
the ones which rattle once the button is pushed,
the secrets which swirl in your cup, catch
in your throat.
The witness who never
lets you down, not even tonight, when a friend
sits crying at your kitchen table and all you can do
is fill the kettle, then stand there, gripping
the handle, waiting for the first tremor,
the long exhalation, the pouring out at last.
THIRD PRIZE: Gillian Knibbs
Unhinged
It lies on its side, the faintness of green
in its mottled windows like moss in a riverbed.
It is unhinged; raw wood gapes
where the locks were gouged out
like donated organs. I didn’t have the heart
to take its numbers. Propped against the hedge
it is still our door – night sentry, gatekeeper,
rattler when lorries passed,
feeder of sneaky draughts.
Unhinged.