Disabled Poets Prize 2025 – judges announced and Prize open for entries

News

Set up by Jerwood Fellow Jamie Hale, the Disabled Poets Prize is a collaboration between Spread the Word, Verve Poetry Press, Verve Poetry Festival, and CRIPtic Arts and is now open for its third year. The Prize is funded by ALCS (the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) and supported by The Literary Consultancy and the Arvon Foundation. The Prize looks to find the best work created by UK based deaf and disabled poets.

The 2025 Prize has two categories – best single poem and best unpublished pamphlet.

We are pleased to announce that the judges for 2025 are:

  • Jamie Hale (best single poem and best unpublished pamphlet)
  • Polly Atkin (best single poem)
  • Khairani Barokka (best unpublished pamphlet) 

Deaf and disabled poets face significant barriers to developing their careers. The Disabled Poets Prize brings the work of the winning writers to new prominence, focusing attention on the exceptional work being produced by deaf and disabled writers. It is the first poetry prize in the UK specifically for deaf and disabled poets.

 Alongside cash prizes, The Prize offers significant professional development opportunities, including a publication deal with Verve Poetry Press for the best unpublished pamphlet as well as development prizes from Spread the Word, CRIPtic Arts, The Literary Consultancy and Arvon Foundation.

For more information and to enter the Prize, visit: disabledpoetsprize.org.uk

Deadline for entries is 1pm, Monday 4 November

Hear this information as audio, watch a BSL video version, or download as a Word document.

Workshops

To support entrants in making submissions to the 2025 Disabled Poets Prize, we are offering two FREE online and BSL interpreted workshops:

Wednesday 9 October, 6.30pm-8pm
Best Unpublished Pamphlet Prize-winner 2024, Susie Wilson, will run a workshop on Putting Good Pamphlets Together.
Places available at: bit.ly/4e6X9Pj

Thursday 10 October, 6.30pm-8pm
2024 Best Single Poem Prize-winner, Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, will run a workshop on editing your poems.
Places available at: bit.ly/4dMlaLF

About the Judges

Jamie Hale, a white person with red hair and beard looks directly towards the camera with a confident smile. They sit in their electric wheelchair in front of vivid red/orange photographers banner, wearing black jeans, a ribbed black turtleneck and a silver floral blazer. A shock of bright pink and orange eyeshadow brings out their green eyes.Jamie Hale – judge for best single poem and best unpublished pamphlet

Jamie is an award-winning theatre maker, poet, (screen)writer, charity CEO, founder and Artistic Director at CRIPticArts. They focus creatively on crip- and queer- realities, and the urgency of living as a disabled person. Their poetry pamphlet, Shield was published in 2021, and read by Jack Thorne in the 2021 MacTaggart lecture, calling them an “extraordinary voice”. Their solo poetry film, NOT DYING, was described as “fantastic” by Hannah Gadsby. In 2021, they were awarded the Jerwood Poetry Fellowship, and won Director/Theatremaker of the Year Award for NOT DYING in the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Awards. Jamie founded CRIPtic x Spread the Word online retreat for deaf and disabled writers in 2020, and ran it in 2021. They have been published in magazines including Magma and the Rialto, guest-edited the ‘Bodies’ issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, and are working on their first full poetry collection.

Jamie says: “Disabled writers are creating exceptional work – and yet rarely receive the mainstream attention it deserves. I founded this Prize to bring more prominence to their work, and I’m very excited to see what this year’s submissions bring.”

Polly Atkin – judge for best single poem 

Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She grew up in Nottingham and lived in East London for seven years before moving north to Cumbria. She has published three poetry pamphlets and two collections – Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) and Much With Body (Seren: 2021), a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation and Laurel Prize 2022 longlistee. Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), a Barbellion-longlisted biography of Dorothy’s later life and illness; and a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability, Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre: 2023), a longlistee of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2024, and Lakeland Book of the Year 2024. Her third nonfiction book is a love song to the owls of Lakeland, The Company of Owls (Elliott and Thompson: 2024). Her work is included in various anthologies, including Moving Mountains (Footnote: 2023). She works as a freelancer from her home in the English Lake District. In 2023 she and her partner took ownership of historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.

Polly says: “The Prize is such an important and necessary part of a poetry ecosystem in which far too many barriers to equality of access and opportunity are perpetuated. The support, perspective, expertise, and community of other disabled writers has been invaluable to me as a writer and a person. The world is better when we work together. I can’t wait to see more disabled poets thrive and develop through initiatives like the Disabled Poets’ Prize. I’m looking forward to reading poems which do the things great poems do on whatever terms they set for themselves: surprise me, change me, change how I experience the world after the poem.”

Khairani Barokka – judge for best unpublished pamphlet 

Khairani Barokka is a writer, poet and artist. She was Modern Poetry in Translation’s inaugural Poet-in-Residence, the first non-British Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow. She is currently UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation and Research Fellow at University of the Arts London. Published internationally in anthologies and journals, Khairani is the author and illustrator of poetry-art book Indigenous Species, nominated for a Goldsmiths Public Engagement Award, author of poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches Press, 2017), co-editor with Ng Yi-Sheng of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Fixi, 2016), and co-editor, with Sandra Alland and Daniel Sluman, of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, 2017), shortlisted for a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology and a Poetry School Book of the Year. Her latest book, poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches Press) was published in March 2021, and was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

Khairani says: “The Disabled Poets’ Prize is very meaningful to myself and to many in our phenomenally talented D/deaf and/or disabled literary community. It aims to celebrate all our stories and verses. I’m delighted to return to the judging panel for it. Jamie Hale founded this Prize to provide a platform to poets who continue to face unjust barriers in the literary sphere, whose artistry is often underestimated, and in fact has always been consistently revelatory.”

Partners and funders

Spread the Word Director, Ruth Harrison says: “Increasing access to literature for both writers and readers is central to Spread the Word’s work, and so we’re delighted to help deliver the Disabled Poets Prize. The outstanding work created by disabled poets deserves to be celebrated and shared, and we hope this Prize can do that.”

Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) CEO Barbara Hayes says: “ALCS is proud to support the Disabled Poets Prize for another year. Addressing the barriers that writers face is at the core of what we do and this prize will undoubtedly promote emerging deaf and disabled creative voices across the country.”


Entries are open until 1pm, Monday 4 November. For more information please visit: disabledpoetsprize.org.uk 

The Prize is free to enter, and donations are welcome to support the future of the Prize: totalgiving.co.uk/appeal/disabledpoetsprize

Published 9 September 2024