Joanna Lowry wins the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2025
'In poem after poem, Lowry works her images and references with great confidence and clarity: sometimes quietly mysterious, sometimes sparkling; varied but deeply connected.' – Imtiaz Dharker, Judge for the 2025 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition
Joanna Lowry's debut pamphlet The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass has won the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2025. The announcement was made in the June 2026 issue of Mslexia magazine. The winning pamphlet will be co-published by Bloodaxe Books and Mslexia on 24 September 2026 as part of the prize.
The 2025 Prize was judged by Imtiaz Dharker, who has served as judge for the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition for the past four years. The 2026 competition will be judged by Maura Dooley.
‘The inspiration for these poems is a series of objects, stolen trinkets, remains, scraps of film, creatures, all left behind by events that cover a sweep of time and terrain. Each one is held up for examination, or perhaps more precisely, for meditation, to reveal a story of seismic shifts in human history and the natural world… In poem after poem, Lowry works her images and references with great confidence and clarity, sometimes quietly mysterious, sometimes sparkling, varied but deeply connected. She works with the dedication and formal skill of a miniaturist. It is an engagement of the body as well as the mind that links the object, the poet and the wider environment in a finely articulated series of relationships.’ – Imtiaz Dharker, Judge of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition, on The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass
An interview with Joanna Lowry and the title poem from her winning pamphlet The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass are featured on the Mslexia website here.
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The long parade of recurring wars and natural disasters forms a shadowy backdrop to Joanna Lowry’s debut pamphlet The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass. Her poems trace the subtle ways in which we attempt to weave our way between these forces of catastrophe through retrieving tiny moments of beauty and contemplation: a few words written on a scrap of paper in a dead poet’s pocket, a clay model of a buddha on a desert floor, a miniature portrait, a cave painting, a shiny fragment of black twisted glass. Each of these objects represents an encounter with a lived moment that is precious, and that is at the centre of a story which is deeply felt and very human, the kind of story that sits outside the larger tide of history, one that helps us to believe we might be saved by art.
Joanna Lowry won the 2025 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker for her debut pamphlet The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2026). She received an MA Distinction in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School/Newcastle University in 2022, receiving a prize for exceptional performance. She has been shortlisted in several competitions, including the Arvon Prize and the Bridport Prize. In 2018 she was commended in the Manchester Poets and Players Competition and won third prize in the Teignmouth Poetry Competition. She was highly commended by Louise Glück for the Moth Poetry Prize and received second place in the Edward Cawston Thomas Prize in 2023. Now living in East Sussex, she was born in Wales and spent her childhood in Nigeria. Apart from writing poetry she has lectured and written about photography and video art.
‘Joanna Lowry’s poetry voyages through time and space with the pale demeanour of a ghost, now perplexed, now disabused, never able to look away. It haunts the galleries of history getting the details right, revisiting moments and figures still living out their fates, but always emerging into the forlorn light of now, as the living poet bearing the scars of it all, the aftermaths of love or horror, the deeds and delusions of men forever sounding in the dark. Lowry’s is a poetry of the still point and the turning world: this is a rich and memorable collection.’ – Glyn Maxwell
‘In this exceptional debut, Joanna Lowry writes of the pain-staking art of the miniaturist, an apt analogy for what she is able to accomplish in her poems. She traces the steps of artists such as Lee Miller and Antonio Machado, chronicles the final hours of Herculaneum, arrives in the museum or at the edge of a cliff. Her painterly eye takes in places as vast and varied as St Petersburg and the Gobi Desert; in these landscapes are stains of human intervention, shadows obscuring the light, but Lowry is always impeccably accur-ate in showing us what it is to be present and observant – a witness to life.’ – Tamar Yoseloff
'A fine project of transformative imagining, a compendium of lyric explorations of moments in global and individual history brought together into an extraordinary and moving poetic whole.' – Jane Draycott
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Bloodaxe Books took over the publication of the winning pamphlets in the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition in 2022. Prior to that, the competition was judged by Seren's now retired poetry editor Amy Wack with the pamphlets published by Seren. Bloodaxe took over from Seren with effect from the 2022 competition, which was judged by Imtiaz Dharker. Two previous winners, Sarah Wimbush (in 2019) and Yvonne Reddick (2016), went on to have their first book-length collections taken on by Bloodaxe. Four winners, Polly Atkin (2012), Cath Drake (2013), Ilse Pedler (2015) and Bryony Littlefair (2017), had book-length collections published by Seren, while Mara Bergman (2012) was taken up by Arc and Jane Lovell by Indigo Dreams.
The first winner to be published by Bloodaxe was Courtney Conrad (2022) for her pamphlet I Am Evidence, which went on to win the 2023 Michael Marks Poetry Award. The winner of the 2023 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition was Nia Broomhall for her debut pamphlet Backalong (2023). Emilie Jelinek won the 2024 competition for her second pamphlet The Sky Around My Father (2025), and Joanna Lowry's debut pamphlet The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass (September, 2026) won the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2025. All these winners were chosen by Judge Imtiaz Dharker.
The Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition is being judged for the first time in 2026 by Maura Dooley, following the first four years of Mslexia's partnership with Bloodaxe with Imtiaz Dharker as judge. The 2026 winner will be announced in the June 2027 issue of Mslexia and on the Bloodaxe website ahead of the pamphlet's publication by Bloodaxe in September 2027.
[01 June 2026]
