DIRT Competition Shortlist

SHORTLISTED POETS

Morag Anderson 

Kara Barlow

Helen Bowell

Rachel Curzon

Karen Downs-Barton

Linda France

Nasim Luczaj

Rona Luo

Jessica Mookherjee

Yvonne Reddick 

Judges’ Comments

"What beauty, absurdity, humour and suffering entered my life while reading submissions for the DIRT Poetry Competition 2026! The poems explore complex interdependencies with precision. Longlisted and shortlisted poems were clear on where the poet places themselves in relation to the world: looking out of a train, through miniaturisation, on an unfamiliar sea, alongside familiar plants, among crockery, in legitimacy, in history, with jungle, with river or simply at the dentist. I was captivated most by voices that revealed themselves without needing to tell me ‘I am’. I remain haunted by some poems long after putting down the pile - the seahorses and blizzards, the confident protest, a wild feminine inventing new forms. I was also lulled by fiery swells of love that settled my own aches. Many poignant images have taken up permanent residence in my mind: the two-headed frog, the body as a community of prophets, socially-engaged aliens and warty brown longings. Whether a poem spoke to me daintily and with subtlety, or announced itself to a marching beat, dragged me into its private grief or side-eyed me nonchalantly, all the poems we selected pleased and excited me greatly. Joe and I re-read the longlisted poems to each other over several sessions to reach our shortlist. The poems in this booklet surprised the writer enough to leave me equally conflicted and bewitched by the diversions taken in the poems.”

            Alice Willitts, editor DIRT plantable poetry

"I’d like to add a personal note of congratulation to the poets on our shortlist. This is a peculiar competition. It’s not often that poets are set up on a blind date and asked to create something together. I admire their sense of adventure and open-mindedness. When strong poems touched on typical eco-poetry or nature poetry, they worked at loving/mourning/tending their world without shouting about it. We encountered such a rich smorgasbord of places, sounds, textures and characters. There were school plays and hedgerow jinxes, lichens and befuddled celebrities. Wherever they took us, the strongest poems lived by Denise Riley’s line: ‘I work to earth my heart’. All the shortlisted poems sang in me instinctively, somatically, before I could analyse technique and form. This is the result of a confident voice and editorial skill; poems which didn’t quite make it occasionally needed more edits to access their beating heart. It’s not my first time judging a competition, but it’s still a funny experience to find myself making decisions about work by poets far more experienced than me. To share these choices with Alice has been a great pleasure. We aired the poems together, and gave them the care they deserve. I hope you will enjoy reading the final pamphlet when it arrives in September. DIRT is such a unique project that I am grateful to have had this opportunity to engage with its weird and wonderful philosophy."

            Joe Wright, guest judge

To all the submitters, thank you. To all the people on our mailing list, which includes our earliest supporters who got us off the ground, thank you. To those people who buy our pamphlets to share as gifts or plant them anywhere and everywhere, thank you, thank you, thank you! Please continue to buy and share DIRT poetry because every purchase directly funds the next commission. Your encouragement for what DIRT might yet be capable of is so emboldening, thank you. 

Biographies

Morag Anderson is a Scottish poet. Her second chapbook, And I Will Make of You a Vowel Sound (Fly on the Wall Press, 2024), won the Aryamati Prize and was nominated for a Sky Arts Award. Her poems appear in Mslexia, Butcher’s Dog, & Gutter. She is a student on Arvon’s Advanced Writing Programme.

Kara Barlow is a trilingual poet with an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University Belfast, where she received the Seamus Heaney International Scholarship. She considers her work a translation exercise between trauma, resilience, and longing. Her poems are published in Letters Journal, Ragaire, and the Silver Press Tendrils anthology, among others.

Helen Bowell's debut pamphlet The Barman (Bad Betty Press, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She co-directs Dead [Women] Poets Society, edited the first anthology of bi+ poets, Bi+ Lines (fourteen poems, 2023), and is now fourteen poems' co-editor.

Rachel Curzon's pamphlet, Faber New Poets 16, was published in 2016. More recently, work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She was the winner of The Rialto Nature and Place poetry competition 2026. Rachel lives in North Yorkshire.

Karen Downs-Barton is a neurodiverse working-class writer from a multiracial background. Her collection, Minx (Chatto and Windus), won the John Pollard International Poetry Award. Didicoy (Smith|Doorstop) was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet recommendation. She is widely anthologised and featured on Radio 4's The Verb, Ledbury and Edinburgh International Book Festivals.

Linda France, FRSL, has published ten collections of poetry – the latest include Startling (Faber & New Writing North 2022) and The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack 2022), which won the Laurel Prize. Linda was Environmental Poet of the Year 2022-23 in the Michael Marks Awards and won the 2013 National Poetry Competition.

Nasim Luczaj is the author of Hind Mouth (Earthbound Press) and Ultraviolet with Landing Marks (Oblique House). Her debut collection, Tang, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in 2027. Raised in Subcarpathia, she lives between London and Glasgow. She edits the magazine Wet Grain and works as a translator.

Rona Luo is a queer, neurodivergent poet and acupuncturist. Her visual poetry has been exhibited at the Southbank Centre, and her writing has appeared in Magma, Propel, fourteen poems, The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and more. She received the Creative Futures Gold Prize in Poetry in 2024.

Jessica Mookherjee is a British poet of Bengali heritage, now living in Kent. She has 3 collections of poetry with Nine Arches Press and one with Broken Sleep Books. Her second collection Tigress was shortlisted for the Ledbury Prize. Widely published, she works full time in public health.

Yvonne Reddick's debut collection Burning Season (Bloodaxe, 2023) won the Laurel Prize for Best First Collection. Her nonfiction book Fire on Winter Hill is forthcoming from Fig Tree at Penguin Random House. She enjoys collaborating with artists, filmmakers and scientists.

And there is more…

The winners of the first DIRT Plantable Poetry Competition for Collaboration are Karen Downs-Barton & Kara Barlow, Morag Anderson & Nasim Luczaj, Linda France & Rona Luo.

The online launch of their collaborative pamphlet (the sea within) is on the 23rd September, 6.30 - 7.30pm. Tickets to this event are free, but please book to receive the Zoom link.

Please buy (the sea within) by Karen Downs-Barton & Kara Barlow, Morag Anderson & Nasim Luczaj and Linda France & Rona Luo which is available to purchase from the Dialect Press bookshop.

Thank you

DIRT is usually able to commission only one pair of poets to collaborate. The reach of this competition has opened up our DIRT publications to more voices. We’re passionate about collaboration, so the competition lent us a way to both spotlight poet-with-poet collaborations and simultaneously offer collaborative writing experiences that we hope will bear fruit beyond this moment. Running a competition has also enabled us to raise awareness about DIRT which, at its heart, is an artistic provocation to change poetry publishing in the UK towards Earth-positive practices. The proceeds from this competition will directly fund the next DIRT commission. We are enormously grateful to everyone who submitted, thank you.