The Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000)

    The Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000)

    The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written (£1,000)

    The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed (£1,000)

 

The winners will be announced at the Forward Prize Ceremony, which will be held at London's Southbank Centre on Saturday 24 October 2026, 7pm-9.30pm. All the shortlisted poets will be invited to perform live before the winners are revealed. Tickets will be on sale from early August (in-person and livestream).

 

The shortlists are on the Forward Prizes website here.

Interviews with all the shortlisted poets will be posted on the Forward Prize website in due course.

For the first time this year, the organisers of the Forward Prizes decided to share their judges' longlists. The full longlists can be found on the Forward Prizes webpage here.

In addition to collections by Tishani Doshi and Roshni Gallagher, five other Bloodaxe titles were longlisted: 

John Challis's second collection The Green Parcel, Clare Pollard's sixth collection Lives of the Female Poets and Penelope Shuttle's fourteenth collection History of the Child were all longlisted for the 2026 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Cathy Galvin's Ethnology: a love song for Connemara and Jennifer Lee Tsai's Melete, both book-length narratives, were longlisted for the 2026 Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection.

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The winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025 was Vidyan Ravinthiran for his third poetry collection Avidyā. This was 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.

The winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024 was Marjorie Lotfi for her debut The Wrong Person to Ask. As with Roshni Gallagher, Marjorie Lotfi was also a joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize.

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For print or digital review copies of any of the longlisted or shortlisted titles, please contact Christine Macgregor: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.

 

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Tishani Doshi's fifth collection Egrets, While War, published by Bloodaxe Books in May 2026, is a lyric field guide to grief and resilience, where attention becomes a form of devotion, and intimacy, a quiet resistance. The poems in Egrets, While War navigate the deep entanglements between environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of ageing, and the devastations of war. With lyric clarity and a gaze both wide and precise, Egrets, While War becomes a meditation on survival – of species, of history, of the heart.

 

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet, novelist and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent, born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her master's in writing from the Johns Hopkins University in America and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001 to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, going on to perform with her on many international stages. Her debut collection, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts, 2006), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Her third, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018. Her fourth poetry collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her fifth, Egrets, While War, was published by Bloodaxe in May 2026, and is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2026. Tishani Doshi lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and dogs. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

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'Doshi reminds us that moments of beauty – of nature, human and nonhuman – persist. […] In ‘A theory on the origin of language’, Tishani Doshi bids her reader: ‘Now scream. Now sing.’ And this is precisely what Egrets, While War does. Her poems scream fiercely, unflinchingly of war and then, without blinking, she sings of what we might return to, what we might survive for.' – Ellora Sutton, Mslexia

‘Flowing between rage, resolve, and fierce love, Egrets, While War feels like being carefully guided through a long, dark night of the soul. A book to dwell on; a must-read.’ – Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Bulletin

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Tishani Doshi: 'Home Speaks in Many Tongues' from Egrets, While War

Tishani Doshi gave a series of performances of poems from her fifth collection Egrets, While War at festivals in Britain and Ireland in summer 2026, including several presentations combining poetry, dance, music and film. This clip of her dance interpretation of the poem ‘Home Speaks in Many Tongues’ was recorded during her event at the Jaipur Literature Festival London at the British Library on 7 June 2026.

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In her debut collection Even the Trees, Roshni Gallagher asks what can be seen, named or remembered. From Scotland to Guyana, the poems explore the porous boundary between the past and the present, and how ecological landscapes and landscapes of the mind and body are permanently altered by migration and memory. The elegiac series of poems Kala Pani reflects on the history and legacy of Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean. Following the experience of women in the moment of rupture as they cross the ocean, these poems hover at the border of what is known and unknown. Other poems navigate stories from Gallagher’s mixed heritage, from the Windrush generation to the sod houses in Ireland. She explores the tension between historical and personal silence – what can and can’t be spoken about.

Roshni Gallagher is a poet from Leeds of mixed Indo-Guyanese and Irish heritage. She lives in Edinburgh. She has received an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (2022) and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award (2022), and was joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize in 2024. Her pamphlet Bird Cherry was published by VERVE Poetry Press in 2023. Her first book-length collection, Even the Trees, is published by Bloodaxe Books in September 2026, and is on the shortlist for the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2026 (one of the Forward Prizes). She has an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of St Andrews.

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‘What impresses me most about this debut collection is its honouring of our humanity, the naming of ordinary people with extraordinary lives. The Kala Pani sequence epitomises this: poignant, exquisite and haunting. Roshni Gallagher’s poems are so visceral, so perceptive, so adept in their use of echoes and white space, they will, to quote her, make you “vigilant when you walk down a street”.' – Patience Agbabi

‘These poems have a special light to them. They feel vulnerable and hard-won, like the best poems. They seem to want to sit down close with the reader and whisper these sad, honest and wonderful things that they know.’ – Niall Campbell

‘Intelligent, searching, and beautifully written, Roshni Gallagher's Even the Trees is an exceptional debut collection, full of enviable phrasing and insight. It's wonderful to find a new poet whose work you know you will continue to follow.’ – Karen Solie

‘These poems are delicately calibrated: they are able to pick out how the stars are not above us, but all around, how the Perseids fall like a shoal of metallic fish; but also carry the awareness of how there is pain in "seeing and being seen", and that some knowledge "can’t be come back from". Here, currents of racism and colonialism persist alongside and threaten to overwhelm the wonder of the unknown, the experience of the natural world made new. A complex, assured, at times stunning debut collection.’ – Peter Mackay

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Roshni Gallagher reads

A multi-artform collaboration between poet Roshni Gallagher, musician Diljeet Bhachu, photographer Kate Soltan and projection artist Robert Motyka brings a unique experience of spoken word accompanied by live flute music to the backdrop of nature imagery. Roshni’s six poems are a tender exploration of how we grieve lost language and histories – and how identity can still be sought after and reclaimed. The piece journeys from a place of disconnection and isolation to one of belonging and community. A soundscape of semi-improvised live flute accompaniment by Diljeet Bhachu complements Roshni’s readings.  Filmed as part of the Edinburgh Multicultural Festival, 15 Dec 2020.

Two of the poems are now included in Roshni Gallagher's debut poetry collection Even the Trees: 'The Whitby' (1:44) and 'Bird Cherry' (7.26).