Freya P makes Foyle Top 15 Poets

Freya P in Year 8 has been named one of the top 15 winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2022.

On Friday 4 November, Freya joined other winners to receive her award at The Buffini Chao Deck at the National Theatre.

Run by The Poetry Society and now in its 24th year, the award finds, celebrates and supports the very best young poets from around the world and is one of the leading competitions for young poets aged between 11 and 17 years old. An amazing 13,500 poems from 6,600 young people were submitted this year from across the UK and the globe, as far afield as Nepal, Panama and Serbia. From these entries, 100 winners were selected, made up of 15 top poets and 85 commended poets.

Judge Mona Arshi, who won the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in 2015 for her work Small Hands, wrote,

‘So many of the poems we read woke up the ear and gave us something we hadn’t heard before. From the “azure fathoms pummelling the shimmering sand” in Freya Madeleine Patterson’s “Anastasia’” to the aching image of “his rusty padlock breath and hollow rasps” in Eric Pak’s “An Aegean Prayer”, so many gifts were offered in their lines.’

Freya is a keen poet and member of Putney’s Ink writing club. You can read her winning poem Anastasia below.