The Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize 2026
APPLICATIONS OPEN ON 1st JANUARY 2026.
Awarded for the best poetic response on the theme, which will be announced shortly.
The winner and runners-up will receive financial support in the following amounts:
Prizes
First place: £3,000
Second place: £1,000
Third place: £1,000
Rules
There is a fee of £10 per entry.
You may submit only ONE poem per entry. If you wish to submit more than one poem, then you should complete multiple entries. Any entry with more than one poem attached will risk disqualification.
Open to all nationalities.
Applicants must be aged 18 or above at the time of entry.
All entries must be written in English.
You can enter multiple prizes.
There is a maximum of 500 words per entry.
There is no minimum required word count.
The use of generative writing programmes or artificial intelligence (for example, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) is strictly prohibited.
Please note: we reserve the right to change any aspect of our prizes at any point during the submission or judging process, or to not award a prize if we wish.
Judge
2026 - Judge will be announced soon.
Past Judges include:
Dr. Maya C. Popa - Most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023), named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry and a finalist for the Levis Reading Prize. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She is previously the author of three chapbooks published in the US and the UK. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London and is at work on a book on literary wonder. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack's best-selling literature publications. She works closely with established and emerging writers through Conscious Writers Collective, her online writing platform and community.
Patrick James Errington - Award-winning poet, translator, teacher, and researcher. His recent poetry collection, the swailing (MQUP, 2023) was shortlisted for Poetry Book of the Year in the Scottish National Book Awards and won the 2024 John Pollard International Poetry Prize. His current translation of philosopher E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks is forthcoming from New York Review Books. Originally from Alberta, Canada, Patrick received an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the University of St Andrews, supervised by Don Paterson and the late John Burnside. He now lives in Scotland, where he lectures on creative writing, poetic theory, cognitive psychology, and literacy for the University of Edinburgh.
John Burnside - FRSL FRSE (19 March 1955 – 29 May 2024) was a Scottish writer. He was one of four poets (with Ted Hughes, Sean O'Brien and Jason Allen-Paisant) to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for a single book – in this case, for Black Cat Bone in 2011. In 2023, he won the David Cohen Prize in recognition of his full body of work.
Previous winners
2025 - On Fear
Winner: Victoria Spires
Victoria Spires lives in Northampton, UK with her family. She returned to writing poetry in 2023 after a 20-year absence. Her work has been published in Berlin Lit, Stanchion, Dust & The London Magazine, among others. She has been commended/shortlisted in several competitions including the Ledbury Poetry Competition, The Poet's Workshop Prize Prize, Aesthetica Arts Creative Writing Award, Artemesia Arts Poetry Competition, and The Plough Prize. She came Third in the Rialto Nature & Place Competition 2025. Her debut pamphlet Soi-même is available from Salo Press.
Runner Up: Caitlin Tina Jones
Caitlin Tina Jones is an emerging autistic poet from Hengoed, South Wales. Her poetry has featured in publications by Pan Macmillan, The Poetry Society, and Poetry Wales. She recently graduated from Cardiff University with a BA in Creative Writing.
Runner Up: Emily Munro
Emily writes poetry and fiction. Her writing has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and was longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award (2023). She has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing (with Distinction) and a PhD in Film Studies, both from the University of Glasgow. Her documentary Living Proof: A Climate Story (2021), made from repurposed archive footage, was nominated for a FOCAL International award and has screened widely, both at home and abroad. Emily lives with her family in Scotland where she is employed as a curator in a national film archive. She is working on a novel and a collection of poems.
To read the winning poems, please click the links below:
2024 - On Language
Winner: Tammy Lynn Armstrong
Tammy Lynn Armstrong is a Canadian poet and novelist She is most noted for her 2002 collection Bogman's Music, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 2002 Governor General's Awards.
Originally from St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Armstrong was educated at the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick.
Armstrong has published the poetry collections Unravel (2004), Take Us Quietly (2006) and The Scare in the Crow (2010), and the novels Translations: Aístreann (2002) and Pye-Dogs (2008). In 2017, Armstrong's Hermit God Spot made the longlist for the CBC Poetry Prize.
Runner-up: Eleanor Stanford
Eleanor Stanford is the author of three books of poetry, The Imaginal Marriage, Bartram's Garden, and The Book of Sleep, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, and many others. She has received an NEA fellowship, and was a Fulbright fellow to Brazil, where she researched and wrote about traditional midwifery in rural Bahia. She lives in the Philadelphia area.
Runner-up: Wilson Taylor
Wilson R. M. Taylor writes poetry and fiction in New York City. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel and at work on a collection of poems.
When he's not writing, he works in brand consulting. Wilson graduated from Amherst College in 2019, where he studied English and French and played baseball.
To read the winning poems, please click the links below:
2023 - On Flourishing
Winner: Lois Jones
Lois P. Jones awards include the Bristol Poetry Prize, the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a single poem, the Tiferet Poetry Prize and winning finalist for the Terrain Poetry contest judged by Jane Hirshfield. She was a finalist in 2023 for the annual Mslexia Poetry Competition judged by Helen Mort and in 2022 for both the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry from Orison Books and the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Other honors include a Highly Commended and publication in the 2021 Bridport Poetry Prize Anthology In collaboration with filmmaker Jutta Pryor and sound designer Peter Verwimp, her poem La Scapigliata won the 2022 Lyra Bristol Poetry Film Competition.
Since 2007 Jones has hosted KPFK’s Poets Café, co-produced the Moonday Poetry Series and acted as poetry editor for Pushcart and Utne prize-winning Kyoto Journal.
Runner-Up: Sharon Black
Sharon Black is a poet and editor from Glasgow. Though she now lives in the south of France she remains an active voice in the UK poetry community through publication of her own work and through her editorship of Pindrop Press.
Black was born and brought up in Newton Mearns in Greater Glasgow. She studied French at the University of Aberdeen, after which she spent a year working as an English teacher in Japan. On returning to the UK Black began a decade-long career as a journalist; as a features writer at the Centre Press agency in Glasgow she wrote for newspapers including The Evening Times, The Herald and The Scotsman. Since 2001 Black has lived in the Cévennes region of Southern France, where she runs Abri Creative Writing, a retreat venue offering residential courses tailored to writers. In 2016 Black took over the editorship of Pindrop Press from poet Jo Hemmant, with the stated aim of publishing poetry that is “exciting, well-crafted and fresh.”
Runner-Up: Katie Hale
Katie Hale won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is the author of a novel, My Name is Monster, and two poetry pamphlets. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize, and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Katie also runs Dove Cottage Young Poets for Wordsworth Grasmere, and is a Core Team Member of the Writing Squad. In 2022, she won the Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction to work on her second novel.
To read the winning poems, please click the links below:
2022 - On Freedom
Winner: Lance Larsen
Lance Larsen was educated at Brigham Young University, where he earned both his BA and MA, and at the University of Houston, where he earned a PhD in literature and creative writing. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including What the Body Knows (2018); Backyard Alchemy (2009); In All Their Animal Brilliance (2005), winner of the Tampa Review Prize; and Erasable Walls (1998). His poems touch on Mormon heritage while examining everyday encounters. Mike White, in Valparaiso Poetry Review, noted of Larsen’s Backyard Alchemy that “the metamorphic translation of beings from one mode of existence to another is the dominant motif of the collection.”
Larsen has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2017, he completed a five-year appointment as Utah’s poet laureate. He is a professor of English at Brigham Young University.
Runner-up: Rosie Rockel
Rosie Rockel works in television and writes poems in the notes app of her phone.
Errol Merquita
Errol A. Merquita is from Los Amigos, Davao City. He has received four awards for his poetry (in Filipino) and fiction (in Cebuano) at the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. His poem “Autopsy” was a runner-up in the 2022 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize in London, UK. Merquita's literary works have been featured in both local and international publications. He mentored poets from the Philippines, Canada, and Africa during the Poets for Climate workshop under the When is Now campaign. Some of his poems have been adapted into short films and performed in various competitions. He has attended writing workshops at UP, Ateneo, and La Salle. He specializes in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation programming and is currently a Program Manager for an international non-government organization.
To read the winning poems, please click the links below: