We are delighted to bring you the longlist for this year’s competition. Congratulations to the authors of these poems!
Huge thanks again to everyone who submitted work to our Spring/Summer competition. This time around, we ran a little later in the year and we relaxed the word count limit, so this is a little different from our usual ‘spring short’ offering.
The shortlist and winning poems will be published shortly….
2026 Spring/Summer Prose Poetry Competition Longlist
- 35 Years Old Today
- After I Deal
- All At Once
- Asparagus Soup
- Black Moses
- Blackout Storm
- Connection
- ‘Electric vehicles are gay’
- Elegy for a Son
- Estrangement
- Every now and then, a flutter
- Fastening the Earring
- Ferris Wheel
- From Earth to Mother
- Gateway Through Darkness
- Grace
- Grandma’s Living Room
- Halt the Borough Market Sun
- His Black Locomotive
- Hole in the Window
- Honig
- Iniquities Most Foul
- Letter on Separation
- Letter on Translation
- Magnolia: A Love Story
- Make Up
- Map
- Michigan, Collected
- My Condolences
- [North]
- North Circular
- Okay
- On a Sunny Day
- Our Loved Ones Don’t Die
- Poem With Ulterior Motives, With Our Star at High Noon
- Pre-Apocalyptic
- Preventive Maintenance
- Puddles
- Really
- Richard Frost
- Schuylkill Banks
- Shadows Play
- sometimes, i
- Sprawl
- Stop over Incheon
- Thank you very much for everything
- The Connection
- The Disappearances
- The first time I mothered my mother
- The Goat
- The Green Man: London to Los Angeles and Back Again, Twenty Years Later
- The Price of Sleep
- The Travelers
- The World and the Story
- The You in this Poem is a Baby
- Waiting
- We Were All Once Flowers
- When the Branches were like Fire
- White Balloons