Ahana takes top poetry prize

Ahana in Year 13 has been named one of the top 15 winners in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2021. This competition, in its 23rd year, is the biggest poetry competition for 11-17 year olds in the world.

This year’s top 100 poems were selected by Clare Pollard and Yomi Ṣode from 14,408 poems from over 6,775 poets aged 11-17 from across the UK and around the world. Writers from 109 different countries entered the competition from as far afield as South Africa, China, Ethiopia and Georgia, as well as the four corners of the UK.

Winners of the award receive a fantastic range of prizes to help develop their writing. The top 15 poets are 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 and Yomi, focusing on improving their poetry and establishing a community of writers. 

The top 15 poems will be published in a printed winners’ anthology (also available online) from March 2022. 

A Difficult Conversation

Ma says she has bigger fish to fry. Disregarding sprats, the white fish, she hoists up an ilish mach about the length of her forearm. I watch her accept it with her knife, oil puckering in the saucepan, anticipating skirts of damp coriander, a fat chalk of canned coconut milk. There is a tenderness to the beheading. Ma cradles ilish jaw like a son-in-law, an absence dislocating bone and lip and eye as I am told to leave or to learn how to hold a heart for the time it takes bigger fish to fry. Ahana Banerji