Announcing the Results of the 2026 International Book & Pamphlet Competition

The International Book & Pamphlet Competition was the first of its kind in Britain. Now in its 40^th year, it has launched the careers of many well-established and successful poets, including Mimi Khalvati, Daljit Nagra, Michael Laskey, Kim Moore, Pascale Petit, and Catherine Smith.

We are now delighted to announce the results of this year’s
International Book & Pamphlet Competition.

Congratulations to the two winners, chosen by Kim Moore:

Derval Tubridy
for her pamphlet I Will Say That

and

Tom Weir
for his pamphlet Negativity Bias

The Two Competition Runners-up are:

Ellie Grant

and

David Hale

Congratulations also to the Highly Commended poets:

Susannah Hart

and

Paul Stephenson

Judge’s comment from Kim Moore:

Judging this competition is one of my favourite gigs. I was amazed by the range and variety of the submissions, the risks that writers take and the ground that they cover. Not only do I get to read amazing writing, I get the space and time to think about the pamphlet as an artform in and of itself. What makes a good pamphlet? Well, there are lots of good collections entered into this competition, but the ones that rise to the top of the read again (and again) pile are the ones that keep haunting me as I go about my daily business, the ones that I can’t stop thinking about.

Thank you to everyone who entered this year — there was such a high standard. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your work and the best of luck as it continues to go forth in the world.

Derval Tubridy

For I Will Say That

Derval Tubridy is an Irish poet whose work responds to the intimate traces that bind and blind. Born in Bandon, Co. Cork, she is based in Dublin. Professor Emerita of Goldsmiths, London, she is the author of Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems (UCD Press, 2001) and Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity (Cambridge UP, 2018). Winner of the 2023 Red Line Poetry Competition, she was Highly Commended in the 2024 Fool For Poetry Chapbook competition, the 2025 Southword Editor’s Poetry Prize and the 2025 Patrick Kavanagh Prize. She is a 2026 Irish Writer’s Centre National Mentoring Programme Awardee. Her poetry has been published in The North, The Stinging Fly, Howl, The Irish Times, The Stony Thursday Poetry Book, The Monster’s Back and is forthcoming in Southward.

In this polyphonic pamphlet, we hear the voices of women caught up in Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot 26 unarmed citizens during a protest march. Drawn from testimony and witness statements, each poem tells a fragment of a larger narrative, exemplifying how poetry can weave the personal, social, historical and political together. These poems are formally inventive and daring in their absolute commitment to a poetic mapping of story and place.
– Kim Moore

Tom Weir

For Negativity Bias

Tom Weir’s poetry has been Highly Commended in both The Forward Prize and The National Poetry Competition. He has won the Magma Editor’s Choice Prize and was one of the inaugural winners of the Templar IOTA Shots competition. He has published two previous collections All That Falling and Ruin, for which he received a grant from the Arts Council. Having spent many years in the North of England, he now resides in the South-West, where he can often be found with a compass and small torch plotting a way back up north.

I read this pamphlet in one long gulp, drawn in by the way the poet weaves loss and love, joy and fear into beautifully sparse meditations on fatherhood. Through explorations of NCT classes, night feedings and the loss of an unborn child, every poem is alive to the music of language, examining what it means to become a parent, where the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes known. These are memorable, carefully crafted and tender lyrics.
– Kim Moore

Runners-Up

Ellie Grant

Ellie Grant is a poet from London. She lives in Manchester, where she completed her BA in 2019, and her MA in 2025. She won the Centre for New Writing MA Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She is working towards her first collection.

David Hale

Born in Scotland, David Hale lives in Gloucestershire. Happenstance published his first pamphlet The Last Walking Stick Factory, Templar published his second In Bedlam’s Wood. His first collection Dancing under a Bloodless Moon was published by Eyewear in December 2020.He’s worked as a teacher in mainstream and alternative provision, also as an ESOL teacher abroad, and more recently has taught English to refugees and asylum seekers in Gloucester.

Highly Commended Poets

Susannah Hart

Susannah Hart’s poetry has been widely published in magazines and online. Her first collection Out of True won the Live Canon First Collection Prize and her poem Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy won the 2019 National Poetry Competition. Susannah is on the board of Magma Poetry and is also a trustee of Poetry in Aldeburgh, where she coordinates the schools programme. She is an experienced poetry tutor, a longstanding governor of her local primary school, and in her spare time is trying without much success to learn Japanese.

Paul Stephenson

Paul Stephenson’s first collection Hard Drive was published by Carcanet in 2023 and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and Polari Book Prize. He has three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which was a winner of the Poetry Business book and pamphlet competition 2014/15 judged by Billy Collins, The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the Paris terrorist attacks, and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). Paul has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the Manchester Writing School and completed the Poetry Business Writing School. He also took part in the Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme and the Aldeburgh Eight. Paul co-edited the ‘Europe’ and recent ‘Ownership’ issues of Magma Poetry. He helps programme the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival. He lives between Cambridge and Brussels.

About the International Book & Pamphlet Competition

The winning collections are beautifully produced and promoted widely, and entered for all eligible awards and prizes. They are also sold in bookshops throughout the UK and through online stockists of The Poetry Business publications.

This year, the two winners have both been awarded a prize of £500 and will receive editorial support from The Poetry Business towards the publication of their winning pamphlets by Smith|Doorstop. The two runners-up each receive an honorarium of £100.

The winners, runners-up and commended poets will all be invited to take part in an online reading and will be published in The North. A celebratory reading and prize-giving for the winning poets will be held at Wordsworth Grasmere.

The 2026 Judge

Kim Moore’s pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. Her first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me was published by Smith|Doorstop in May 2022. A hybrid book of lyric essays and poetry Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism was published by Seren in March 2023. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Ann and Peter Sansom are directors of The Poetry Business and editors of The North magazine and Smith|Doorstop books. Ann’s publications include Romance and In Praise of Men & Other People (Bloodaxe) and Peter’s include Writing Poems (Bloodaxe) and Selected Poems (Carcanet).

Each and every year The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition discovers and publishes exciting and substantial new poets…There’s no doubt that this is a career-changing poetry competition. If you’ve got a solid body of work that you’re pleased to have written, there’s nowhere better to send it.
The Poetry Trust

One of the career milestones for very many poets of note
Anne-Marie Fyfe

I’ve judged a lot of contests, but I can’t recall any where the quality of the poems – one manuscript after another – was so high
Billy Collins, 2015 competition judge

The International Book & Pamphlet Competition