English PEN, together with partners Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, has opened submissions for the PEN Heaney Prize 2026, and announced poets Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Vona Groarke and Stephen Sexton as judges for the 2026 Prize.
The PEN Heaney Prize was launched in 2024 in memory of the late Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, to recognise a single-author collection of poetry of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.
Tom Paulin was the winner of the 2025 Prize for Namanlagh (Faber), his first collection in over a decade. Susannah Dickey won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize in 2024 for her debut collection, ISDAL (Picador).
The partners have also announced that the 2026 Prize ceremony will be held in Leeds, in partnership with the National Poetry Centre, following the inaugural ceremony in Belfast and the 2025 event in Dublin. The ceremony moves between English PEN and Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann’s regions of work, and will return to Belfast in 2027.
2026 judges Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Vona Groarke and Stephen Sexton will be joined by Mick Heaney, representing the Estate of Seamus Heaney, who will act as non-voting Chair of the judging panel. The Prize celebrates work that, in the words of Heaney’s Nobel Lecture, remains “true to the impact of external reality and … sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being”.
The Prize is open to original English-language collections and collections translated into English, published in the UK and/or Ireland. The Prize is open to titles published between 1 January and 31 December 2026, with two submissions windows open from 1 April–31 May 2026 for collections published between 1 January and 30 June 2026, and from 1–31 July 2026 for collections published between 1 July and 31 December 2026.
The PEN Heaney Prize is supported by Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney.
Publishers can read the full eligibility criteria and submit to the Prize here.