Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidya wins the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025
Vidyan Ravinthiran is the joint winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025 for his third poetry collection Avidyā. This is the first time in the history of the Forward Prizes that two poets were jointly awarded the Best Collection Prize. The second poet was Karen Solie for her collection Wellwater (Picador). This historic announcement was made at a ceremony at London's Southbank Centre on 26 October 2025.
Judge Rommi Smith said of Avidya:
'Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidya is a deeply moving, relevant, necessary collection of poems that meditates on identity and belonging. A fusion of Sri Lankan culture, Englishness, whatever that has come to mean in this moment and in context of this book, and the questions that it asks about what it is to speak English are profoundly relevant and timely given the political situation in terms of the rise of the far right, and what is happening in terms of xenophobic ideas of who belongs and who doesn't. I found this profoundly moving to read. It touched me deeply.'
The Judges commented on their decision to award the Best Collection Prize to two books, Avidyā and Wellwater.
Judge Rommi Smith said:
'What unites these collections is their sense of courage and conviction. This is poetry as counternarrative. In a time of deepening divisions, these vital books show us what poetry can do: gift us an opportunity to see our reflection, or difference, in the words of a stranger, yet hold the eloquence and intimacy of that experience, unafraid. These collections are absorbed in, and alive to, risk - whether that be protest, survival, or tenderness. Vidyan Ravinthiran and Karen Solie win joint first prize for Best Collection. This is the first time in the history of the Forward Prizes that this prize has been awarded to two collections. Passionate explorations of their respective themes, these collections are in conversation with the canon, without being beholden to it. Congratulations to both poets - and to all of the winners and shortlisted and longlisted writers. It has been an immense privilege to read this year’s entries.'
Judge Sean O’Brien said:
'The dual winners of the Best Collection prize address unignorable crises – on one hand the environmental barbarism which may well finish us off, and on the other the collapse of a society into ethnic violence resulting in migration. If these books were merely topical they could hardly compete with the news media. But the poetic imagination, as Wordsworth wrote, enables us to ‘see into the life of things'. We might add that poetry also reclaims the world from the merely habitual. [...] Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Avidyā is an invitation to visit the sites of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the atrocities it produced, and to see their surviving ethnic and cultural imprint. The book also offers the chance to learn something of the religious and linguistic context, rather than feeling generalized outrage or sympathy. It’s no accident that the book’s title is Avidyā – ignorance, delusion. Ravinthiran, the child of immigrants to the UK, explores an ancestral homeland whose meanings are both vital and difficult of access. How are we to come at history, he asks, when we have not lived it?'
Judge Lisa Kelly said:
'Chosen from a dazzling shortlist celebrating groundbreaking ‘firsts’, including two Deaf poets in the Best Single Poem Performed category and two Latinx books in the Best Collection category, the winners confirm the Forward Prizes as a champion of exceptional poetry that foregrounds the vitality of the human spirit in the face of personal and existential crises. Karen Solie’s Wellwater and Ravinthiran’s Avidyā address the urgent challenges of our time – climate crisis; war and migration – with personal insight and philosophical depth.'
Judge Hannah Lavery said:
'This year’s winners show just how many ways poetry can speak to us right now. We couldn’t choose between Avidyā by Vidyan Ravinthiran and Wellwater by Karen Solie for Best Collection — they’re so different in style, but equally powerful. Ravinthiran’s book is dazzling and searching, while Solie’s is rooted and elemental, alive to the world around us. Together, they show the range of what poetry can do.'
Judge Sean O'Brien said:
'There's a deep music to Niall Campbell's The Island in the Sound, as well as a strong sense of place at the edge of the ocean, perhaps the edge of the world. Campbell's poems treat life, death, love, time and belonging with tender exactitude. The result can be both transparent and mysterious. A sign that this book is the real thing.'
The Forward Prizes for Poetry are the most influential set of awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland, honouring bold new voices alongside internationally celebrated names. First awarded in 1992, the Prizes have recognised some of the biggest names in contemporary poetry over the past 33 years. The winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024 was Marjorie Lotfi for her debut The Wrong Person to Ask.
The 2025 shortlist was selected by a judging panel chaired by award-winning novelist Sarah Hall, alongside acclaimed poets Lisa Kelly, Hannah Lavery, Sean O’Brien and Rommi Smith. Together, they read over 214 poetry collections and reviewed 340 single poems.
Details of the winners and the shortlisted poets are on the Forward Prizes website: https://forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry/
The 2025 Forward Prizes for Poetry are awarded in four categories: the Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000), which was shared between the two joint winners Vidyan Ravinthiran and Karen Solie; the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000), the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written (£1,000), and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed (£1,000).
The winners of all four categories were announced at the Forward Prize Ceremony which was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's Southbank Centre on Sunday 26 October 2025. The event featured readings by all the shortlisted authors, and was also livestreamed.
Interviews with both Bloodaxe poets are on the Forward Prize website. Vidyan Ravinthiran talks about Avidya here and Niall Campbell about The Island in the Sound here.
Vidyan Ravinthiran’s sequence ‘Karna’ from his third collection Avidyā was featured in full on the London Review Bookshop blog in their series celebrating the shortlistees of the 2025 Forward Poetry Prizes. Read the feature here.
Canadian poet Karen Solie was given first publication in the UK by Bloodaxe Books. Her 2013 retrospective The Living Option: Selected Poems, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, is still available from Bloodaxe.
Best Collection joint winners Vidyan Ravinthiran and Karen Solie discussed their collections Avidyā and Wellwater in The London Magazine. Read online here.
An excellent joint interview with Vidyan and Karen was featured on BBC Radio 4's Front Row on 28 October 2025. Final item, from 32:13. Listen here.
A delightful interview with Vidyan Ravinthiran about his winning collection Avidyā ran on BBC Radio London's Jumoké Fashola show on 12 December 2025. No longer available via BBC Sounds.
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For digital or print review copies of The Island in the Sound and Avidya, please email Christine Macgregor at Bloodaxe: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
For interview requests in relation to the Forward Prizes for Poetry, please contact Ned Green at FMcM: NedG@fmcm.co.uk
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Sunday 26 October 2025, 7pm, Forward Prize Ceremony, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
The winners of all four categories were announced at the Forward Prize Ceremony which was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's Southbank Centre. The event featured readings by all the shortlisted poets.
Vidyan Ravinthiran read 'Mourning' from his third collection, Avidyā (introduced at 2:6:25). Avidyā was later announced as joint winner of the Best Collection Prize. Niall Campbell read 'Apprenticeship' from his third collection The Island in the Sound (introduced at 2:12:15).
At 2.25:52, Chair of Judges Sarah Hall explained why the judges felt that their only option was to jointly award the prize to two collections: Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidyā and Karen Solie's Wellwater. Both poets then came back onto the stage to be presented with their awards by William Sieghart.
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Vidyan Ravinthiran is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard in the US. His memoir Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir, was published in January 2025 by Norton in the USA and by Icon in the UK.
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South Uist poet Niall Campbell's The Island in the Sound creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his birthplace into conversation with moments from literature and history. Now based in Fife, Niall Campbell lived for a number of years in Leeds, where Vidyan Ravinthiran was born and grew up. Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It draws on British, Sri Lankan and North American cultures and landscapes.
South Uist poet Niall Campbell's third collection The Island in the Sound creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his birthplace into conversation with moments from literature and history.
Niall Campbell's debut Moontide won both the Saltire First Book of the Year Award and the inaugural £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His second collection Noctuary was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2019. His third full collection The Island in the Sound was published by Bloodaxe in September 2024. It was longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2024 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025. It is on the shortlist for Scotland's Poetry Book of the Year 2025 (The Saltires: Scotland's National Book Awards).
Born and raised on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, Niall Campbell now lives in Fife. In March 2024 he took over as Editor of Poetry London.
‘Niall Campbell’s previous two collections had marked him out as a devoted singer, but in The Island in the Sound he’s added further layers, and colours, to his range. It feels a more expansive, ambitious, collection, with epistolary poems, myth-fashioning and an increased interest in history and folklore counterweights to the delicately lyrical work, but Campbell has all the while retained his eye for detail, for the observant, redolent image.’ – Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
For links to reviews, features and interviews for The Island in the Sound, see: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/news?articleid=1454
[26 October 2025]
