Georgie Woodhead wins Foyle Young Poet of the Year

Huge congratulations are in order to 15-year-old Georgie Woodhead, one of the 15 winning poets of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2018, and to Maya Williams-Hamm, 16, highly-commended in the competition.

Judges Daljit Nagra and Caroline Bird (herself a former winner) chose 15 winners and 85 commended poets from a whopping 6,000 poets and nearly 11,000 poems. Writers from 83 different countries entered the competition, from as far afield as Trinidad and Tobago, Sri Lanka, Uruguay and Malaysia. Selecting just 100 winners was a tough job – Daljit Nagra has spoken about “the maturity of the work we read; so many of our young poets showed a keen awareness of serious issues such as identity politics, environment issues and the global tensions currently between nation states.”

The Foyle Young Poets 2018 anthology will see the top 15 poems in print, with the commended poems being published in an online anthology.

Both poets went to London on 2nd Oct to receive their honour. Georgie also recorded her winning poet for The Verb with South Yorkshire’s very own, Ian McMillan (airing on Radio 3 at 10pm on Friday 5th Oct). You can listen below.

Massive thanks to The Poetry Society for all you do to support and encourage poets of all ages! 

You can read Georgie’s and all the winning poems here
www.newwritingnorth.com/nwn-young-writers/young-writers-awards/georgie-woodhead 

Georgie Woodhead Bio
Georgie Woodhead is a young writer from Sheffield who attends Hive’s Sheffield Young Writers. She was one of two highly commended young poets in the Cuckoo Northern Writers Award 2018. She was a winner of the Foyle Poetry Prize 2018 and came 2nd in the young people’s category of the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2018. Georgie has been published in Hive anthologies, halfway smile and wild poetry. She’s performed at various young writers’ events, and festivals including the Ted Hughes Poetry Festival 2018.

Top/bottom photos: Hayley Madden for The Poetry Society