- Now in its third year, the PEN Heaney Prize celebrates poetry that engages with the impact of cultural and political events on human conditions and relationships.
- Six poetry collections from five publishers have been shortlisted for this year’s Prize.
- The winner will be announced in Leeds (1 December 2026), marking the first time the Prize ceremony has been held in England, following previous ceremonies in Dublin and Belfast. Tickets to the ceremony are available to book below.
- Leeds community group Speak Your Truth will perform new poetry with live musical accompaniment at the ceremony.
English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, announces the shortlist for the PEN Heaney Prize 2026, which recognises 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.
The PEN Heaney Prize 2026 shortlist is:
- Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi (Bloodaxe Books)
- Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by Mira Rosenthal (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- Dwelling by Máighréad Medbh (Macha Press)
- plastic by Matthew Rice (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- Pain Songs by Daniel Sluman (Nine Arches Press)
- October by Nur Turkmani (Hajar Press)
The Prize moves annually between English PEN and Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann’s regions of work. Tom Paulin won the 2025 Prize for Namanlagh (Faber), his first collection in over a decade, announced at a ceremony at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin in December 2025. Susannah Dickey was announced as the inaugural winner for her debut collection, ISDAL (Picador), at Queen’s University Belfast, in 2024.
The winner of this year’s PEN Heaney Prize will be announced on Tuesday 1 December 2026 at a ceremony at the Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, in partnership with the National Poetry Centre. The event will include the performance of new poetry with live musical accompaniment from local community group Speak Your Truth, inspired by the theme of the Prize.
The PEN Heaney Prize 2026 is judged by poets Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Vona Groarke and Stephen Sexton, with Mick Heaney joining them as non-voting Chair and representing the Estate of Seamus Heaney.
Of the shortlisted titles, the judging panel said:
Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi
‘Tishani Doshi’s dextrous, vibrant and vital poems delight and shimmer. Across Egrets, While War, the range of her subjects is vast: the ancient and modern comingle with poems of personal and civic responsibility. Throughout, an aviary of sonnets addresses the birds of mythology and literature with grace and invention. Wars, historical and contemporary, provide the contexts for these powerful poems of resistance and humanity.’
Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
‘Mer de Glace is a compelling and vivid collection that throws the natural world and its human-led decline into sharp clarity. With grace, measuredness, and an attention to the smallest of details, Małgorzata Lebda’s clear and watchful eye consecrates all that it witnesses.’
Dwelling by Máighréad Medbh
‘Máighréad Medbh’s Dwelling is a thrilling collection that offers readers not only an interrogation of language, family, archives, nation, and history, but a reckoning with the very means by which we read and understand each of these. Its world is one from which we emerge altered.’
plastic by Matthew Rice
‘Matthew Rice’s plastic, set during a single twelve-hour shift in a plastic moulding factory, finds space in the routines of physical graft for poems that slyly challenge the very notion of “poetic” subject matter. Random thoughts and snatches of song lyrics or poems sit alongside vignettes of fellow workers and wider considerations of social reality and historical dissonance. Altogether, plastic offers a time-stamped, vigilant, orchestral portrayal of a mind at work.’
Pain Songs by Daniel Sluman
‘In Pain Songs, Daniel Sluman’s focus is the embodied experiences of pain and pleasure. These luminous and subtle lyrics are sensuous and profoundly intimate; in their largesse they give us poems of relationships, sex, pregnancy, and parenthood. The disabled body is, of course, a politicised body. What Sluman has achieved here is akin to a politics of intimacy in its most virtuous expressions of tenderness and compassion.’
October by Nur Turkmani
‘The poems of Nur Turkmani’s October explore, in her native city of Beirut, the fallout of war and the ways in which, despite it, it is possible to protect the delicate sustenance of hope. In poems that are precise, deft, and variously courageous, October avows fidelity to friendship and love, all the more precious for the collection’s backdrop of violent crisis and historic rift.’
The PEN Heaney Prize is supported by Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney.