Sarah Howe's Foretokens has won the Forward Prize for best collection, ten years after her debut Loop of Jade made history as the first debut to win the TS Eliot prize. The £10,000 award was announced at a ceremony hosted by Joelle Taylor at London's Southbank Centre, with judge Sarah Moss noting that poetry offers 'words, images and metaphors for what matters in interesting times' — a formulation that undersells what Howe actually does, which is closer to fracturing the lens of the personal until it refracts something larger. The collection moves across new parenthood, her father's death, and her Chinese mother's early life in Hong Kong — the same biographical coordinates as Loop of Jade, but transformed. Reviewer Rishi Dastidar identified something new in the tonal register: anger, which brings what he called 'a pleasing sharpness' to investigations that take on genetics and time's relativity alongside the familial and the historical. The Forward Prize co-executive director Mónica Parle noted it 'can emerge after 10 years in the making and still bear distinct relevance to our time' — a quieter way of saying the book is not nostalgic but present-tense urgent. The Jerwood Prize for best first collection went to Nur Turkmani, a Lisbon-based poet raised in Beirut, for October, published by Hajar Press — a first nomination and first win for the independent publisher. Turkmani wrote the poems during a period that compressed protest, wildfire, economic collapse, a port explosion, and ongoing war into a single sustained emergency. 'Writing became a way of seeing, understanding and continuing,' she said. The compression shows in the title: October is not a thematic collection but an accounting. Tara Bergin, Dublin-born and now teaching at Newcastle University, won the prize for best single poem in written form for The Fear, first published in the Stinging Fly. The poem grew from a class she had taught — 'Fear Poetry' — which she eventually had to attempt herself. The best single poem in performance went to Scottish singer-songwriter Biff Smith, reigning Scottish and World Poetry Slam champion, for Dumbarton East, recorded at Loud Poets. Smith wrote it on a train, describing a 'urge to make that time count.' Both received £1,000. This year's judging panel — chaired by novelist Sarah Moss and including Romalyn Ante, WN Herbert, Michael Mullen, and Yomi Ṣode — operated across written and performance forms, which the Forward Prizes have maintained as a structural commitment since 1992. The prize history includes Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Claudia Rankine. Last year's best collection prize was shared for the first time between Vidyan Ravinthiran for Avidyā and Karen Solie for Wellwater. Foretokens was also shortlisted for the 2025 TS Eliot prize, meaning Howe is in conversation with both major UK poetry institutions simultaneously. That Loop of Jade was a debut TS Eliot winner and Foretokens arrives a decade later suggests a deliberate pace — not silence, but patience. The question now is whether the anger Dastidar identifies as new signals a third register still coming, or whether this collection is the synthesis.
