Pascale Petit has won the £1,000 Keats-Shelley poetry prize for her poem, ‘Night Canoe on Lake Sandoval’. A second poem by Pascale Petit,  ‘John Gould’s Hummingbird House’, was highly commended by this year’s judges. Mark Fiddes was also highly commended for his poem ‘Some seasonal adjustments’. 

It is the second time Pascale Petit has won the award, after her poem ‘Indian Paradise Flycatcher’ took the prize in 2020. She said: “Winning the Keats-Shelley poetry prize has special significance for me because Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale‘ is the poem that made me want to write poetry when I was sixteen. When I heard the teacher read it out it was like a close friend holding out their hand to show me the way through my life.” 

She said her winning poem was inspired by “several boat or pontoon rides on oxbow lakes in the Peruvian Amazon. Lake Sandoval is a particularly beautiful lake in the pristine Tambopata National Reserve, and giant river otters live in dens in the half of the crescent not allowed to tourists. Their wavering screams are extraordinary to hear and I wanted to capture the feeling the sound gave me, at the same time my awareness of their endangered status.”

The Keats-Shelley essay prize was won by Tom Bailey for his essay, Listening to William Blake.The Young Romantics poetry prize was won by Chelsea Guo for her poem, ‘Portrait of My Mother, Lovely’ and the Young Romantics essay prize went to by Lila Abularach for her essay, Turning In and Out: John Clare’s Negotiation of the Sonnet’s Form.

The theme of the 2026 prize was chosen to mark the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Entrants were invited to submit poems on the subject of either ‘Dystopia’ or ‘Utopia’.  Chair of the judges, author, journalist and critic Rupert Christiansen, said that “in an era dogged by the threat to human creativity posed by AI, the entries all showed an unmistakeable originality of thought that no computer software could ever replicate”.