The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2026
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The London Magazine is the UK’s oldest literary magazine, proud to have published some of the biggest names in poetry including T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin. Past winners include Kathryn Bevis, Jay Gao and Isabelle Baafi.
Now, continuing that tradition, we launch our 2026 Poetry Prize. We are delighted to announce that entries will be judged by: Isabelle Baafi, Dean Browne and Luke Kennard.
Established to encourage emerging literary talent, the award provides an opportunity for publication and recognition. While there is no criteria as to theme, form or style, judges are looking for resonant and accomplished work.
Poems must be previously unpublished and no longer than 40 lines. Submissions are open for international entries.
All three prize winners will appear in a print issue of The London Magazine. Prize winners will also receive cash prizes, and will be celebrated at a prize-giving event in the summer.
Information
Entry fee: £12 per poem
Subsequent entries: £6 per poem
Student and low-income entry: £6 per poem
(Must be submitted with a valid university email address)
Membership entry: One free entry (subsequent entries £6)
Note: There is no limit to the number of entries you can submit, but please only submit one poem per entry. Entries with multiple poems will not be considered or notified. It is advised that you read the competition rules before submitting.
Opening date: 19th December 2025
Closing date: 13th March 2026
First Prize: £1000
Second Prize: £600
Third Prize: £400
Enter The London Magazine Poetry Prize
We are interested in a wide variety of topics and many different styles of writing. However, we do find that those who are familiar with what we publish stand a far better chance of having their submissions accepted, so we also recommend getting your hands on a copy of our print journal which can be purchased here from our shop.
Judges
Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She won First Prize in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2023 and Second Prize in the The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2022. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.
Isabelle is looking for poems that are ‘as full of life as their author’: ‘Poems that feel necessary, striking, honest and somehow transformative. Poems that understand risk and are not afraid to take one. Poems that challenge and surprise, and say the thing only you can say.’
Dean Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2020 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 Columbia Review, The London Magazine and New York Review of Books. His first collection After Party is published by Picador.
Dean believes ‘you can make a poem of anything, however seemingly trivial or frivolous’: ‘If you write intensely enough your real concerns, or the real concerns of the poem, will bleed through the fabric. I’m interested in poems that surprise themselves, that take a line for a walk and fall off the roof Buster Keaton style – that is, swinging in on a drainpipe through a window below, unforeseen yet inevitable, embracing the risk of failure but – somehow – landing. I’d like to see poems unafraid to push the imagination and disturb the language, for the poet to allow the poem to lead them somewhere they couldn’t have prefigured before starting in on it. To go up to the brim and then above the brim. So much the better if we recognise ourselves in it, and it reflects something of the world we inhabit, as well as your singular vision of it. Be imaginative; be empathetic; be roguish. Or don’t do any of this and surprise me anew into what poetry is capable of.’
Luke Kennard is a poet and novelist whose sixth collection, Notes on the Sonnets, won the Forward prize in 2021. His third novel, Black Bag, was published by John Murray and Zando in 2026. He lives in Birmingham and is a professor of literature and creative writing at the university.
‘I love poems that could only have been written by you – whether you’re early in your writing or whether you’ve refined your voice over years or decades. Poems that own our idiosyncratic, flawed personalities rather than just trying to sound the way a poem should sound. But most things I could say here would be contradicted by half the poems I like. I enjoy intense and inventive imagery, but I also like a flat, straightforward tone when the poem calls for that. I suppose, like any reader, I’m looking for that combination of confidence and uncertainty, of treating the reader like an intelligent person, of trying to show them something new.’
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