Competition Winners Announced!

WIRRAL POETRY FESTIVAL OPEN POETRY COMPETITION 2026 RESULTS

The team at the Wirral Poetry Festival is delighted to be able to share the results of the 2026 Wirral Poetry Festival Open Poetry Competition. The full list of results is given below.

We are especially grateful to our invaluable adjudicators Martin Figura and Helen Ivory (Open Prizes) and Anna Saunders (Liverpool City Region Prizes) for their timely and thorough work.

This was the first year we awarded extra prizes to entrants from the five boroughs that make up the Liverpool City Region, and we were delighted both by the number and the quality of poems entered from the region.  Anna Saunders wrote in her report: “It was an honour to judge the Liverpool City Region [entries], and an experience both exhilarating and awe-inspiring. The abundance of fine, beautifully crafted poems made narrowing my selection to a shortlist herculean. Many of the poems I read demonstrated impressive skill and deep expertise in the art and craft of poetry, along with a wide breadth of knowledge; myth, legend, birds, natural history, politics, art and philosophy were amongst the many themes. There is evidently a wealth of talent flourishing in the Liverpool City Region!”

Helen Ivory and Martin Figura who adjudicated the Open Prizes described the difficulties of narrowing down their selection: “Getting down to the last fifty is hard because we are human beings and it can be  difficult to switch the subjectivity button off when a writer has for example, presented us with the facts of the worst, or the best day of their life.  Selecting the last twenty is harder still, and that last ten almost impossible.  The final seven, in this case, almost beyond impossible…” and concluded “Thank you one and all for your poems – we enjoyed reading them very much.  There can only be so many winners – we hope the rest of you forgive us for not choosing your poems,  and we wish you and your poems well.”

To everyone who entered the competition: your participation has indeed been highly appreciated not just because we have had the privilege of reading your poetry but because your entries help to support our poetry festival. Even though we had a larger than ever number of entries this year, every poem was read and appreciated by the adjudicators. And because the number of entries was greater than previously, we added four extra prizes.

Special congratulations to David Bawden and Grace Stanger who respectively won first prizes in the Open and Liverpool City Region categories. And congratulations to all our runner-up prize-winners and to those whose poems were highly commended. We look forward to celebrating with as many of you as possible  at our awards ceremony during our annual poetry festival in Port Sunlight, Wirral on 4th October 2026.

OPEN COMPETITION

Adjudicated by Martin Figura and Helen Ivory

Open Competition Overall Winner (£250)

Daddy, where do babies come from?
David James Bawden

Six  Open Runners-Up  (£25 each)

How We Made It Through the Dark Days
Steve Pottinger

Pink Ribbon
Sally Spiers

Rising 80L
Steven Shakespeare

Time stopped for me
Margaret Poynor-Clark

Botanizer
Sue Wood

I was resolved that freedom would be mine
Katharine Meeham

Open Competition – Highly Commended

Sometime loss feels more like an absence  / Sometimes it’s a great big hole
David Bawden

Snare
Scott Elder

LIVERPOOL CITY REGION (LCR) PRIZES

Adjudicated by Anna Saunders

LCR First Prize (£100)

Alex’s Wake.
Grace Stanger

Four LCR Runners-up (£25 each)

A Letter of Marque
David Wilkinson

Infanticide
Leon McRae

What we Left at the Bottom of the Sea
Bev Montague Clark

Some Cultures Share, Adapt or Steal Belief Systems and Gods
Adam Paxman

LCR Highly commended

Should have been Aphrodite
Alison Chisholm

The Day the English Forgot Who Made Tea
David Wilkinson

Toddler Responds to Giacometti Sculpture.
Andrew Green

Cow Parsley in Pickerings’ Pasture
And
Unpicking Penelope
Jenny Robb

After Evangeline
Ann Evans

A sudden Rose in Full Bloom
Alice Fleetwood

Winners and Runners Up 

Swipe to scroll through the poems

This year’s poetry competition adjudicators

Martin Figura

Martin Figura is an accountant, poet and portrait and social documentary photographer. He has published several poetry collections, the latest of which is The Remaining Men (Cinnamon, 2024).

Helen Ivory

Helen Ivory is both a poet and a visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat & Tears and teaches for Arvon and online for the National Centre for Writing Academy.

She is widely published and has received many awards. Helen’s latest book is Constructing a Witch (Bloodaxe, October 2024) which focusses in on the monstering and othering of women, and the fear of ageing femininity.