The 12th Christopher Tower Poetry Prize competition’s theme was ‘Voyages’ – launched last November at the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.  The entrants (all born between 1994 and 1996) came from every part of the UK – 356 schools were represented.
At a lunchtime reception in Christ Church, Oxford on Thursday 19 April, seventeen year-old Sarah Fletcher, from The American School in London, won the £3,000 first prize for her poem Papa’s Epilogue.  The judges were the poets Christopher Reid, Don Paterson, and Peter McDonald.
The winner of the second (£1,000) prize is Bethan Smith, from South Essex College with Balloon-song and the third prizewinner (£500) is Millie Guille (St Bartholomew’s School, Newbury, Berkshire) with Maiden Voyage.

The other short-listed winners, who each received £250 were: Hannah Tran (Dalriada Grammar School, Co.Antrim), Lucy Hely-Hutchinson (Benenden School, Kent) and Jack Whitehead (Wells Cathedral School, Somerset).
One of the judges, Christopher Reid, winner of the 2009 Costa Book Awards with A Scattering said that ‘I was delighted by the adventurous spirit of so many of our young voyagers, who took us to surprising places, sometimes by highly imaginative means of transport.’ The sea, life’s journeying, voyages through time were all used to good effect.
Now in its twelfth year, the Christopher Tower poetry competition is one of the most prestigious poetry competitions in the UK, with a reputation for discovering fresh and exciting poetry talent. Previous prizewinners such as Caroline Bird, Helen Mort (who will co-judge the 2012 Foyle Young Poets competition with Christopher Reid), Richard O’Brien, Charlotte Runcie, Anna Lewis and Annie Katchinska are now gaining further acclaim in other competitions or within the publishing/ writing world. The competition is just one of the initiatives developed by Tower Poetry at Christ Church to encourage the writing and reading of poetry by young adults. Other projects include summer schools, poetry readings, conferences, an ongoing publication programme and website, which is used as an educational resource in schools.  The next event will be Professor Sir Geoffrey Hill in conversation with Dr Peter McDonald on W.B. Yeats in Christ Church on Wednesday 9 May at 5.30pm.
All the winning poems are on the Tower Poetry website with their young authors reading their own poems (www.towerpoetry.org.uk), and further information on the competition and other Tower projects from This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or on 01865 286591. Follow us on Twitter @TowerPoetry or on our Facebook page http://on.fb.me/HrGdyZ.

View photos of the event

Note to editors:

The Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes were launched following a bequest to Christ Church, Oxford, which provides for the promotion of the art of writing poetry in English. The prizes aim to encourage the writing of poetry amongst young people in the 16-18 year-old age group by establishing an annual set of prizes on a given theme.
•    Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong in 1949, educated in England, and studied at Oxford University from 1968-1971. He is often cited as co-founder with Craig Raine of the 'Martian School' of poetry which employs exotic and humorous metaphors to defamiliarize everyday experiences and objects. He has also written two books of poetry for children: All Sorts (1999) and Alphabicycle Order (2001).  From 2007-09 he was Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. He will co-judge the 2012 Foyle Young Poets competition with Helen Mort, (a Tower Poetry commended winner in 2004).
His latest collections are The Song of Lunch (2009), and A Scattering (2009), in memory of his late wife, Lucinda. A Scattering was shortlisted for the 2009 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize, and won the 2009 Costa Book of the Year.
•    Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee, Scotland. His collections of poetry are Nil Nil (Faber, 1993), God’s Gift to Women (Faber, 1997), The Eyes (after Antonio Machado, Faber, 1999), Landing Light (Faber, 2003; Graywolf, 2004), Orpheus (a version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus, Faber, 2006) and Rain (Faber, 2009; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Most recently, Rain won the 2009 Forward prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association; he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010. He teaches poetry at the University of St Andrews and since 1996 has been poetry editor at Picador MacMillan. He continues to perform and compose.
•    Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962 and is the Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, Oxford.  He is working on a major three-volume edition of The Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats for the Longman Annotated English Poets series and a volume of translations from ancient Greek. His Collected Poems will be published in 2012. More generally, Peter McDonald has been a prolific writer on modern and contemporary poetry, and his criticism appears regularly in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review and PN Review. His latest book of poetry is Torchlight (Carcanet Press, 2011).