First Prize: John Burnside Ruin, Blossom (Jonathan Cape)
Second Prize: Hannah Copley Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry)
Third Prize: Robyn Maree Pickens Tung (Otago University Press)
Best First Collection UK: Charlotte Shevchenko Knight Food for the Dead (Jonathan Cape)
Best International First Collection: Megan Kitching At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press)

The prize awards £5,000 (1st prize), £2,000 (2nd prize), and £1,000 (3rd prize). There’s also a £500 award for each of the Best First Collection UK and Best International First Collection. In addition, a winner will receive a commission from National Landscapes to create a poem based on their favourite UK landscape.

John Burnside (b. 1955 – d. 2024) was the author of fourteen collections of poetry and eleven works of fiction, as well as three uncompromising memoirs. He achieved wide critical acclaim in his lifetime, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes, and winning the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for Black Cat Bone. In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. Born in Scotland, he moved away in 1965, returning to in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. He was a Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews and divided his time between Fife and Berlin.

Hannah Copley is a British writer and academic who works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. She is the author of two collections, Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, 2024), which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Anthropocene, Blackbox Manifold, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, the Anne-thology and others. She runs poetry events at the Soho Poly in London and is an editor at Stand Magazine.

Robyn Maree Pickens lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Tung is her first poetry collection. She has a PhD in English (reparative ecopoetics) from the University of Otago, and is in the early stages of growing a food forest.

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a writer of both British and Ukrainian heritage. She was a winner of the New Poets Prize in 2022 with her debut pamphlet, Ways of Healing. Her debut collection, Food for the Dead, is published by Jonathan Cape. It won an Eric Gregory Award in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Foundation’s 2024 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. Shevchenko Knight is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University and is based in York.

Megan Kitching lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poetry has been published in Aotearoa New Zealand and international journals. At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023), her debut collection, won the 2024 Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The Time of the Wetlands was runner up in the Caselberg International Poetry Prize 2023. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident.