Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award

The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is now firmly established as the key award for young writers aged between 11 and 17 years. Each year 100 winners (85 Commendations and 15 Overall Winners) are selected by a team of high profile judges, and receive their awards at an annual prize-giving event on National Poetry Day. The Award has been supported by the Foyle Foundation since 2001 - during this time it has trebled its support and enabled the competition to become one of the premier literary awards in the country.

Overall Winners from the 15 to 17 age category then attend a week-long intensive residential Arvon course where they develop their creative writing skills and establish peer support structures. Winners aged 11-14 group benefit from poetry residencies at their school followed by distance mentoring. Alongside the Winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award benefit from on-going support and encouragement, via publication, performance, promotion and internship opportunities.

Get full details on The Poetry Society website here.

See below to read about Martha Sprackland and Adham Smart's experiences of winning the award.

Planting the seeds of poetry...

Martha Sprackland, co-editor of Cake magazine, has won the award twice. Her poetry has appeared in Magma, Brittle Star, Cadaverine, Pomegranate and Agenda; and she is currently at Lancaster University studying English Literature and Creative Writing.

To be a Foyle Young Poets Award alumnus is to be part of a very fortunate group of writers. For young poets there is nothing more intimidating than trying to find a place in the poetry world, when continually faced with high-profile competitions and publications open only to those who have already succeeded in making a name. Young poets can circle the walls for years looking for a foothold, with little or no help reaching them from within. What the FYP provides is a doorway. Each year the fifteen most promising new poets writing in English receive that which they most need – encouragement. The Award doesn’t simply hold up a single poem, congratulate the poet and then send them on their way; instead it ensures that the poetry keeps flowing.

The cherished prize of a residential Arvon Foundation course is the real treasure, that dreamlike week we spend communing with likeminded writers, discovering wonderful new poetry, attending workshops, and writing, writing, writing on anything close to hand; be it fridge magnets, leaves, chalkboards, computers, our arms, even bananas! Suddenly other people wanted to read our poetry, to make suggestions, to feed us the encouragement most young poets are desperately craving.

I myself am lucky enough to be a double-alumnus; my first win at the age of eleven led to a Lumb Bank course tutored by Peter and Ann Sansom, fantastic poets who provided that much-needed guidance at the very start of my writing life. I continued writing, thanks to the FYP (then called the Simon Elvin Award), and six years later a second win took me to The Hurst, tutored by George Szirtes and Colette Bryce. This course was different, so focused, so intense, as we stayed up late into each night, writing for the next day’s workshop.

Those early workshop experiences gave me a headstart in Creative Writing workshops at university, gave me insight into the editing and rewriting processes, and showed me how to read poetry critically. I have no doubt that without the extra shots of confidence the FYP gave me at the ages of eleven and seventeen I wouldn’t have continued to write and submit so determinedly, and that in my case it really has been the launching-pad for my writing career.

That first success is all it takes to plant the seed of confidence in an emerging writer. To be rewarded for doing what you love and to be given the opportunity to read your peers is often the catalyst propelling young poets onto ever bigger and better things. When I launched Cake Magazine last year with Andrew McMillan, this point was at the forefront of our collective thinking. We both remember our first dizzying acceptance letter for a publication, and the realisation that yes, actually, we can do this! Publishing new poets alongside the work of established writers like Cliff Yates, Roddy Lumsden and George Szirtes not only encourages emerging voices, but also gives them a vision of what’s out there. It introduces good poetry to new poets, and it brings the new poets to us. It also makes us, as editors and young writers, feel pretty good.

The Catalyst

Adham Smart is an Anglo-Egyptian boy occupying a small area of Southeast London. Since winning the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2006, he has been published in a handful of places, including a poem in the Rialto, a couple of short stories for The Cadaverine and a digital chapbook on the Mimesis website, and was selected for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Awards 2008 and 2009. In 2009 he read at the Houses of Parliament to celebrate Siegfried Sassoon’s collected writings being bought by the National Heritage Memorial Fund. He collects foreign languages like planets collect satellites.

As a young writer, it can be difficult to know where to start. Lots of people, young and old, write for pleasure, but if you ask them what they do with the stuff they write, they’ll often tell you that it stays in their diary, that they’ve only shown it to a couple of other people, if anyone. For many, that’s what writing is: a private hobby, meant for no-one but the writer. It’s hard to progress past this stage without some kind of external support, without which you’re never sure if what you’re writing is actually any good or not.

Enter the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. As someone who knows nothing about football, I’m tempted to say it’s a bit like being approached after a kick-about in the park and invited to play for Chelsea. You go to a snazzy awards ceremony, your poem goes on the Internet, and suddenly you actually get results when you Google yourself (something all writers have done many times). This recognition is in itself is a huge boost to your self-confidence, but the big prize is the coveted Arvon course. I’ve been lucky enough to go three Arvon courses, and when I say that they changed my life, I don’t mean in the pedantic butterfly effect way. They had an immediate and measureable effect on who I was, what I did, what I wrote, and the people I met. If I traced all the decisions and events that lead to other significant events in my life, a lot would lead back to that first Arvon course in February 2007.

I left every Arvon course with sheets of scribbles, huge bags under my eyes from all-night chatting, mud on my shoes and friends for life. It’s hard to imagine how you can get so close to people in such a short time, but you do. Perhaps it’s because the week’s so intense that you can go from complete strangers to best friends in the space of five days, and no doubt that fact that you’re all there because you love writing helps as well. All I know is that there’s nothing quite like it, and you meet some very special people on it, and now that I’m tragically ineligible for it, I would give anything to go again.

One product of that first course was the poetry e-zine Pomegranate. In a collective effort, the Foyle Young Poets 2006, myself included, decided to set up a publication that would showcase poetry by the some of the best writers under 30 writing in English, and now in its third year, and having just received a £6,000 grant from the Arts Council to do-up the website, we’re still as keen as ever.

(You can go to www.pomegranate.me.uk for more info, and there’s a Facebook group too.)