Sarah Howe has won the Forward prize for best collection, one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards, for Foretokens, a collection that explores new parenthood, the death of her father and her mother’s early life in Hong Kong. Howe was announced as the winner during a ceremony hosted by Joelle Taylor at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday evening, and will receive £10,000. Howe was born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother.
Foretokens, her second collection, comes a decade after Loop of Jade became the first debut to win the TS Eliot prize. Foretokens was also shortlisted for the 2025 TS Eliot prize. Reviewing Foretokens for the Guardian, Rishi Dastidar called it “a quite brilliant return”, praising Howe’s “keen, probing intelligence”.
The Forward prizes’ co-executive director, Mónica Parle, described Foretokens as “an exceptional collection” that “can emerge after 10 years in the making and still bear distinct relevance to our time”. The prize also recognised three other winners. Nur Turkmani, a Lisbon-based poet who grew up in Beirut, won the £5,000 Jerwood prize for best first collection for October, which was also shortlisted for this year’s PEN Heaney prize.
The poems were mostly written in Beirut during a period when “there were protests, wildfires, economic collapse, a port explosion and an ongoing war”, Turkmani said, “and writing became a way of seeing, understanding and continuing”. It is the first nomination and first win for her publisher, the independent Hajar Press. The Dublin-born poet Tara Bergin, who teaches creative writing at Newcastle University, won the Forward prize for best single poem in written form for The Fear, first published in the Irish literary magazine the Stinging Fly.
Smith wrote the poem on a train: “So much of life is spent in transit, I feel an urge to make that time count – do some knitting, learn Italian or whatever (maybe even write a poem).” Bergin and Smith each received £1,000. This year’s judges were the novelist Sarah Moss, who chaired the panel, alongside Romalyn Ante, WN Herbert, Michael Mullen and Yomi Ṣode. Last year, the best collection prize was shared for the first time in its history, between Vidyan Ravinthiran for Avidyā and Karen Solie for Wellwater.
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