English PEN, together with partners Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, has opened submissions for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025, and announced poets Sasha Dugdale, Seán Hewitt and Zaffar Kunial as judges for the 2025 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.
2025 judges Sasha Dugdale, Seán Hewitt and Zaffar Kunial will be joined by Chris 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. Following the inaugural edition of the Prize, the partners have introduced several changes to the Prize criteria:
- The Prize will now recognise collections published within the Prize year, rather than the previous calendar year. The 2025 PEN Heaney Prize is open to titles published between 1 January and 31 December 2025.
- There are now two submission windows for the Prize, to accommodate the change to awarding collections published within the Prize year:
- the first submission window is open 1 April–31 May 2025, for collections published between 1 January and 30 June 2025.
- the second window will be open 1 July–31 August 2025, for collections published between 1 July and 31 December 2025.
- The Prize is now open only to collections, with pamphlets and chapbooks not eligible.
- Each publisher or imprint can submit up to five collections to the Prize (across both submission windows), with a short rationale as to how each title reflects the aims of the Prize.
The full criteria can be found here (Word doc, 23Kb).
Submissions are now open for publishers from the UK and Ireland, for titles published between 1 January and 30 June 2025. They will close at 23.59pm BST on Saturday 31 May 2025, reopening on 1 July 2025 for titles published between 1 July and 31 December 2025. Submit to the 2025 PEN Heaney Prize here.
The PEN Heaney Prize is supported by Hawthornden Foundation.