The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have announced the winners of the 2025-2026 Keats-Shelley Prizes at a special awards ceremony held on 16 April 2026 at 50 Albemarle Street, the former home and office of Lord Byron’s publisher, John Murray.
The Prizes include the Keats-Shelley Prize for essays and poems and the Young Romantics Prize, also for essays and poems, open to those aged 16 to 18yrs.
Pascale Petit has won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize for her poem, Night Canoe on Lake Sandoval. This is the second time Pascale has won having received the award in 2020 for her poem, Indian Paradise Flycatcher. Pascale is also in the remarkable position of being the first poet in the history of the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize to have both won and been highly commended in the same year. Pascale’s poem, John Gould’s Hummingbird House, was submitted and was highly commended by this year’s judges.
Pascale said of her win:
‘Winning the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize has special significance for me because Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale‘ is the poem that made me want to write poetry when I was sixteen. When I heard the teacher read it out it was like a close friend holding out their hand to show me the way through my life. And I have followed that path through the painful wood, listening to the nightingale of nature. Thank you to the judges for choosing my poem and encouraging me with my current collection in progress.’
Pascale explained the inspiration for her poem:
‘My winning poem ‘Night Canoe on Lake Sandoval’ was inspired by several boat or pontoon rides on oxbow lakes in the Peruvian Amazon. Lake Sandoval is a particularly beautiful lake in the pristine Tambopata National Reserve, and giant river otters live in dens in the half of the crescent not allowed to tourists. Their wavering screams are extraordinary to hear and I wanted to capture the feeling the sound gave me, at the same time my awareness of their endangered status.’
The Keats-Shelley Essay Prize was won by Tom Bailey for his essay, Listening to William Blake.
Tom, is delighted with the success of his essay:
‘It’s an absolute honour and joy to have won the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize. Blake is a poet whose work means a great deal to me, and whose lines have stayed with me ever since my mother first read them to me as a boy.
The argument in my essay, that poems should be listened to, is hardly a radical one. But it’s one that I think is especially important with Blake, whose poems come alive when read aloud – and by ‘come alive’ I suppose I mean that they become strange, difficult even, as we try to pronounce them. His rhythms are constantly taking us by surprise.’
The Young Romantics Poetry Prize was won by Chelsea Guo for her poem, Portrait of My Mother, Lovely and the Young Romantics Essay Prize won by Lila Abularach for her essay, Turning In and Out: John Clare’s Negotiation of the Sonnet’s Form.
The theme of the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize 2026 was chosen to mark the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Entrants were invited to submit poems on the subject of either, ‘Dystopia’ or ‘Utopia’. Entries for the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize 2026 could be on any aspect of the writing and/or lives of the Romantics and their circles.
Chair of the judges, author, journalist and critic Rupert Christiansen, said of this year’s Prize winners:
“Judging this year’s finalists has been a rewarding and refreshing experience in an era dogged by the threat to human creativity posed by AI, the entries all showed an unmistakeable originality of thought that no computer software could ever replicate. Pascale Petit’s poem evoked both mood and landscape with rare and refined sensibility, and Tom Bailey’s essay opened fresh perspectives on the genius of William Blake. They are both distinguished and worthy winners.”
Joining Rupert, fellow judges for this year’s poetry prizes were award-winning poet Will Kemp and Professor Deryn Rees-Jones, and for the essay prizes Professor Simon Bainbridge and Professor Sharon Ruston.
The winners of the Keats-Shelley essay and poem prizes receive £1,000, and the two runners-up £500. The Young Romantics essay and poem prize winners each receive £700 and the two runners-up £300 each.
The winners are:
Keats- Shelley Poetry Prize – Pascale Petit – Night Canoe on Lake Sandoval
Highly Commended
Mark Fiddes – Some seasonal adjustments
Pascale Petit – John Gould’s Hummingbird House
Keats-Shelley Essay Prize – Tom Bailey – Listening to William Blake
Highly Commended
Elizabeth King – Life Among the Ruins: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley on Human History and Animal Futures
Karen May – “That Colossal Wreck”: La Boétie, Prometheus and the tyrant’s downfall in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’
Young Romantics Poetry Prize – Chelsea Guo – Portrait of My Mother, Lovely
Highly Commended
Millie Hamill – The Last Nature Reserve
Shuyu Zheng – The Regulations of Happiness
Young Romantics Essay Prize – Lila Abularach – Turning In and Out: John Clare’s Negotiation of the Sonnet’s Form.
Highly Commended
Ela Begum Kumcuoglu – To Imagine is to Resist: the Emotional Politics of Dystopia
Matilda Sheehan – What is the appeal of dystopias in literature?
The winning poems and essays and those shortlisted can be read here https://www.keats-shelley.org/