Peterborough teenager wins Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award

Hollie Fovargue (17) won with her poem ‘Dust’ and will receive a range of prizes designed to help her further improve and develop her writing.

Winners of the award receive a fantastic range of prizes to help develop their writing. The top 15 poets have been invited to attend a residential writing course at the Arvon centre, The Hurst in Shropshire, in February 2022. There they will spend a week with this year’s judges, Clare Pollard and Yomi Sode, focusing on improving their poetry and establishing a community of writers.

All 100, made up of 15 top poets and 85 commended poets, will also receive a year’s youth membership of The Poetry Society and a goody bag full of books donated by Foyle’s sponsors. The Poetry Society continues to support winners throughout their careers providing publication, performance and development opportunities and access to a paid internship programme.

The top 15 poems will be published in a printed winners’ anthology (also available online) from March 2022. The 85 commended poems will appear in an online anthology. Both anthologies showcase the talent of the winners and are

distributed free to thousands of schools, libraries, reading groups and poetry lovers across the UK and the world.

Run by The Poetry Society and supported by the Foyle Foundation, this is the 23rd year the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award has been running. Since 1998, the Award has been finding, celebrating and supporting the very best young poets from around the world.

The competition is firmly established as a leading competition for young poets aged between 11 and 17 years old.

An amazing 14,408 poems from 6,775 young people were entered across 109 countries entered the competition from as far afield as Argentina, Egypt, Kenya, South Korea and the Seychelles, and every corner of the UK.

Judges Clare and Yomi said: “Judging this year’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year was an absolute honour. After a period in which the burdens of the pandemic have often fallen so heavily on young people, we were moved by the beauty, fire and resilience of these poems.”

Hollie’s winning entry ‘Dust’ is as follows:

To be in the dark is

To move without order

And perhaps even contentment

In the knowledge that one can scream

And not be heard

Or seen.

Plain to you, plain to me

One cannot complain.

One was not there,

One was not seen.

Next time, Next time…

Perhaps next time

One will be seen.

Like ash after the fire has burned

Like salt once the water is parched

Particles that dance

With grace or none,

Always unseen

Until,

Just like Dust in a spotlight,

I begin to gleam.