Sarah Howe and Nur Turkmani Win the 2026 Forward Prizes for Poetry

Sarah Howe has won the 2026 Forward Prize for Best Collection for Foretokens (Chatto & Windus). The Forward Arts Foundation announced the winners of all four Forward Prizes for Poetry on October 24, after a ceremony at the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. The evening was hosted by Joelle Taylor, with chair of judges Sarah Moss and judge Michael Mullen announcing the results.

The four winners

• Forward Prize for Best Collection: Sarah Howe, Foretokens (Chatto & Windus)
• Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection: Nur Turkmani, October (Hajar Press)
• Best Single Poem, Written: Tara Bergin, "The Fear" (published in The Stinging Fly)
• Best Single Poem, Performed: Biff Smith (Loud Poets)

Howe, who has already won the T.S. Eliot Prize, was described by the foundation as a poet who "navigates the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism through the portrait of motherhood" in her new book. The collection asks how a new generation can transform a shattered inheritance, and what is lost and gained along the way.

Turkmani's debut moves across several Lebanese Octobers. The foundation called it "formally spare and emotionally saturated," a book that "refuses both numbness and spectacle" while it meditates on rupture and on relationships coming undone and being remade during collective catastrophe.

On Bergin's "The Fear," the judges said what stood out was its universality. "It's a simple poem and yet it does so much," they said. "It's not only timely; it's timeless."

For the performed-poem prize, the judges talked about the difficulty of weighing the poem itself against the performance, and said a winner needs both. They praised the humour in "Dumbarton East," the poem by Smith that was on the July shortlist, calling it a love poem to a place that also turns toward themes of place and memory. (The winners announcement lists Smith's entry under the title "Where I'm From.")

Who else was in the running

The foundation announced the shortlists on July 16. Howe beat Tishani Doshi (Egrets, While War, Bloodaxe Books), Keith Jarrett (Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied, Bad Betty Press), Karen McCarthy Woolf (Unsafe, Bloomsbury Publishing) and Caroline Smith (Bycatch, Nine Arches Press) for Best Collection.

The first-collection shortlist was Sophie Dumont (Sculling, Corsair), Roshni Gallagher (Even the Trees, Bloodaxe Books), Shauna M. Morgan (Ground Provisions, Peepal Tree Press), Catherine Redford (The Way the Water Held Me, The Emma Press) and Turkmani.

Sarah Moss, the novelist who chaired the panel, was joined by poets Romalyn Ante, WN Herbert, Michael Mullen and Yomi Ṣode. When the shortlists came out, Moss said she had not "fully anticipated the joy of reading, working with and listening to people whose vocation is poetry."

Why it matters for writers

The Forward Prizes are among the most closely watched poetry awards in the UK, and the lists are a good map of who is publishing poetry now. Of the ten collections shortlisted across the two book prizes this year, most came from independent presses such as Bloodaxe, Bad Betty, Nine Arches, Peepal Tree, The Emma Press and Hajar Press. The winning first collection came from Hajar Press, and the written-poem winner first appeared in a literary magazine. For poets building a career, magazines and small presses remain a real route to the biggest stages.

Sources

• Forward Arts Foundation, October 24, 2026: Winners of the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2026
• Forward Arts Foundation, July 16, 2026: Forward Prizes for Poetry 2026 shortlisted poets