News | Kevin Graham wins The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025

The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025 winner announcement with an image of winner, Kevin Graham

May 1, 2025

Kevin Graham wins The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025

After selecting a shortlist of nine poems from thousands of entries, the judges of The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025 award first place to Kevin Graham for his poem, ‘Aspiration’.

Submissions were read anonymously by the panel of judges: Jason Allen-Paisant (Self-Portrait as Othello and The Possibility of Tenderness), Fiona Benson (Vertigo and Ghost and Midden Witch) and Mai Serhan (CAIRO: the undelivered letters and I Can Imagine It for Us).

‘The poem is set in a hospital’, Kevin says, ‘and thinks out that experience which can be strange and unnerving. I’m acutely aware it’s a subjective business and wish to thank the judges sincerely for this honour. I very much look forward to reading the other poets on the list. It’s especially gratifying that, by entering, so much money has been raised for MAP and The London Magazine are to be applauded for supporting the humanitarian work that MAP do.’

One of our judges, Mai Serhan, had the following to say on the winning poems:

All three winning poems offer worlds with secret doors that open unto other worlds. To my delight, I unlocked new meanings every time I entered their spaces to read. They speak of dislocation, of whim, of the untethered state of our being, while also being contained within the razor-sharp precision that language can offer. ‘Aspiration’ lives up to its ‘flame under a numbing poise’, ‘Monk and the Porpoise’ to its ‘straightforward, roundabouts’, while ‘Gunpowder’ ushers in a new Gazan voice of enormous potential.

Fiona Benson, too, praised the winning poem, ‘Aspiration’, for its ‘exquisite phrasing and music’: ‘I found myself holding my breath every time I read it.’ For the runners-up, she admired the humour and ‘startling imagery’ of ‘Monk and the Porpoise’, and the ‘furious disbelief’ and ‘unreckonable sorrow’ of ‘Gunpowder’.

As well as receiving prizes of £500, £300 and £200 respectively, the winners are to be published in the upcoming June / July 2025 issue of The London Magazine. To ensure you get a copy before it sells out, subscribe here.

The prize raised over £10,000 for Medical Aid for Palestinians, who have been working in Palestine and Lebanon for more than 40 years. MAP works with Palestinian communities to deliver locally-led health and medical care to those worst affected by conflict, occupation and displacement.

The full list of winners include:

First Place: ‘Aspiration’ by Kevin Graham

Headshot of Kevin Graham, winner of The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025.

Winner Kevin Graham’s poems have appeared widely in print as well as on radio and he has received Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland. A second collection with Gallery is forthcoming in September 2025. His first collection, The Lookout Post, was published by Gallery Press in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Pollard Prize and won the Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award.

Second Place: ‘Monk and the Porpoise’ by Dean Browne

Image credit: Crónán Ó Doibhlin.

‘It’s a delight and an honour that my poem, ‘Monk and the Porpoise’, is one of the winners of this year’s The London Magazine Poetry Prize. I would like to thank the judges and congratulate the other winners, and those shortlisted and longlisted.

I think in this poem I was exercised by an interest in what I’d call ‘creative mishearing’ – in the tango, you could say, between unerring precision and the imaginative possibilities of error, sponsored by a porpoise and the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk respectively, who spoke of ‘the right mistakes’. And by extension in how people speak through and past each other, and what gets gleaned, half-heard, in that slippage. Our vexed attempts to connect and maybe how, as Louis Macneice wrote, ‘the more there are together, Togetherness recedes’.’

Dean Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Recent poems have appeared in The London Magazine and New York Review of Books. His debut collection After Party will be published by Picador in September.

Third Place: ‘Gunpowder’ by Batool Abu Akleen

Headshot of Batool Abu Akleen, runner up in The London Magazine's Poetry Prize 2025.

‘When the genocide started, I was 18. My womanhood was stolen from me even before experiencing it. This poem is about me, all girls, and women in Gaza.’

Batool Abu Akleen is a poet and translator from Gaza, Palestine. She is a student of English literature and Translation at the Islamic University of Gaza. At the age of 15, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud’. In 2024 She was the Poet in Resistance with Modern Poetry in Translation. Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications. Her recent work was included in Letters from Gaza, published by Penguin. This June, her debut bilingual poetry collection 48kg./ ٤٨كغم will be published by Tenement Press, UK.

The full shortlist is as follows:

‘Gunpowder’ by Batool Abu Akleen

‘Ritual Dog’ by Christopher Allen

‘Monk and the Porpoise’ by Dean Browne

‘Nature Held Me Close and Seemed to Find No Fault with Me’ by Iona Carmine Roisin

‘My Cunt is a Sonnet etc. etc.’ by Olive Franklin

‘Aspiration’ by Kevin Graham

‘Dreamsand’ by Sam Harvey

‘Ritual Objects’ by Cleo Henry

‘A Rare Creature of the Deep’ by Hywel John

We would like to thank everyone who entered the competition and our judges. We received an unprecedentedly high number of submissions and, as judge Fiona Benson said, ‘the quality of the work was truly breathtaking’.

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