2026 Open Poetry Results

Congratulations to Laura Strickland for her winning entry I Have A Polaroid Of Me in the Open Poetry Competition.

I have a Polaroid of me

on a sofa with a bowl of jelly/in a green party hat that covers one eye/and squeezed under an arm is a teddy as big as me with fancy braces/I called him Lally/I have no idea why/but once I heard that kids call their teddies after imaginary friends/Lally came to Brownie sleepovers in church halls/to London on a school trip where for once/it wasn’t me in trouble/when Shanice nicked Mrs Dawson’s purse/it was Lally I invited to tea parties with Sarah next door/it was Lally I took to the women’s refuge with one purple crayon in my pyjama pocket/where I shared a bedroom with four other kids/and hid Lally under a Nightrider duvet during Murder in the Dark/Lally was often the dead one/sometimes it was me/it was like sleeping to shut everything out/but still see the light come through/someone let a dog in/or someone’s husband/or my dad/or the dad of the little kid no one played with/I followed the pieces of Lally like Gretel lost in the wood/whenever I see a certain shade of pink/I give thanks to the thread a woman used/to put him back together

Our thanks go to the shortlist team and to Clare Shaw our 2026 Open Poets Judge. Without our judges we wouldn’t be able to run the competitions.

The winning entries can be downloaded and enjoyed from the table below.

Position	Title	Author	Download Link (Subject to Availability)
1st	I Have A Polaroid Of Me	Laura Strickland
2nd	The Chameleon	Caroline Good
3rd	Tractatus Galapagos	Peter Marshall
Hilly Cansdale Local Prize and The People's Prize	Nunavut	Lucy Manners
Highly Commended	Still Life With Walking Frame	Elaine Desmond
Highly Commended	When The Gorse Is Out	Kristina Diprose