The Forward prize for best collection has two winners this year – the first time the prize has been shared – it was announced at the ceremony at London’s Southbank on Sunday night. The joint winners are Vidyan Ravinthiran, who was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and now lives in the US, and Canadian poet Karen Solie. Vidyan Ravinthiran’s first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the TS Eliot Prize in 2019. His third, winning collection, Avidyā, described as having emerged from “journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries”, was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025. He is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka, and is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard.

Karen Solie shared the prize for Wellwater, a “self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink”. She grew up on the family farm in south-west Saskatchewan. She teaches half-time at Scotland’s University of St Andrews and spends the rest of the year in Canada.

One of the judges, poet Lisa Kelly, said the winners “address the urgent challenges of our time” – climate crisis, war and migration – “with personal insight and philosophical depth”.

The evening’s other awards went to Isabelle Baafi, a London-based poet of Jamaican and South African heritage, who won the Jerwood prize for best first collection for Chaotic Good, which is described as “a feat of formal brilliance” that explores power and transformation through escape from a toxic marriage.

Abeer Ameer, a Cardiff-based poet of Iraqi heritage, won the Forward prize for best single poem in written form for ‘At Least’. The poem is in response to airstrikes on a block of flats, and was praised for its “devastating” meditation on loss and for exposing the “duplicity of language” that can sanitise media coverage of Gaza.

The Manchester poet Griot Gabriel received the Forward prize for best single poem in the performance category for ‘Where I’m From’, a “love letter to Manchester”.

This year’s judges  – Sarah Hall, Lisa Kelly, Hannah Lavery, Sean O’Brien and Rommi Smith – praised the ambition of the shortlisted works. Lavery said the joint best collection winners reflected “how many ways poetry can speak to us right now”.

“It was buoying to read poetry from all corners of the globe and find within its diversity common ground – light, song, sincerity, humour, wisdom and courage,” said the chair of judges, the author Sarah Hall.