Sarah Howe has won the Forward prize for best collection, one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards, for Foretokens, a collection that explores new parenthood, the death of her father and her mother’s early life in Hong Kong.
Howe was announced as the winner during a ceremony hosted by Joelle Taylor at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday evening, and will receive £10,000.
Howe was born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother. Foretokens, her second collection, comes a decade after Loop of Jade became the first debut to win the TS Eliot prize. Foretokens was also shortlisted for the 2025 TS Eliot prize.
Reviewing Foretokens for the Guardian, Rishi Dastidar called it “a quite brilliant return”, praising Howe’s “keen, probing intelligence”. “Taking on the biggest of subjects – genetics, time’s relativity, becoming a parent – as well as re-examining her mother’s occluded history in Hong Kong, there is now an anger in Howe’s tonal range, which brings a pleasing sharpness to her investigations,” he wrote.
The Forward prizes’ co-executive director, Mónica Parle, described Foretokens as “an exceptional collection” that “can emerge after 10 years in the making and still bear distinct relevance to our time”.
The prize also recognised three other winners. Nur Turkmani, a Lisbon-based poet who grew up in Beirut, won the £5,000 Jerwood prize for best first collection for October, which was also shortlisted for this year’s PEN Heaney prize. The poems were mostly written in Beirut during a period when “there were protests, wildfires, economic collapse, a port explosion and an ongoing war”, Turkmani said, “and writing became a way of seeing, understanding and continuing”. It is the first nomination and first win for her publisher, the independent Hajar Press.
The Dublin-born poet Tara Bergin, who teaches creative writing at Newcastle University, won the Forward prize for best single poem in written form for The Fear, first published in the Irish literary magazine the Stinging Fly. “Many years ago I devised a poetry writing class called ‘Fear Poetry’,” she said. “I got so interested in the whole idea I had to try it myself.”
The Scottish singer-songwriter Biff Smith, who won both the Scottish and World Poetry Slam Championships last year, received the prize for best single poem in the performance category for Dumbarton East, recorded at the Scottish performance night Loud Poets. Smith wrote the poem on a train: “So much of life is spent in transit, I feel an urge to make that time count – do some knitting, learn Italian or whatever (maybe even write a poem).” Bergin and Smith each received £1,000.
This year’s judges were the novelist Sarah Moss, who chaired the panel, alongside Romalyn Ante, WN Herbert, Michael Mullen and Yomi Ṣode. “In months when the world could easily seem darker every week, it was consoling to be called back into poems and collections and performances day after day,” said Moss, “not because poetry is any kind of panacea but because poets give us words, images and metaphors for what matters in interesting times.”
The Forward prizes were established in 1992 and have recognised some of the biggest names in poetry, including Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Claudia Rankine. Last year, the best collection prize was shared for the first time in its history, between Vidyan Ravinthiran for Avidyā and Karen Solie for Wellwater.
