This years competition will be judged by Jo Shapcott & Daljit Nagra.

Jo Shapcott has been awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry & has won a number of literary prizes including Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Collection, Forward Prize for Best Collection, National Poetry Competition(twice), & the Costa Book Award for her most recent, Of Mutability. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book & My Life Asleep are gathered in a ‘selected poems’ entitled Her Book.

Daljit Nagra was the first poet to win the Forward Prize for both his first collection of poetry, in 2007, and for its title poem, Look, We Have Coming to Dover!, three years earlier. His other publications include a retelling of the Ramayana, a Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition winner, Oh My Rub!, & two further poetry collections, Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy Machine & his latest, British Museum (Faber, 2017).