Ashani Lewis, a student at The Tiffin Girls’ School in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, was awarded the 2016 Christopher Tower Poetry Prize, an annual award to encourage aspiring poets aged 16 to 18.
The theme for this year’s competition was “wonder”, a subject that attracted 1,100 entries.
Ashani, 17, won the £3,000 first prize for a poem entitled Flowers from the Dark.
The £1,000 second prize went to Safah Ahmed, from Newham Collegiate Sixth Form Centre in east London, for a poem called Accent, while Sophia West, from Oxford High School, was awarded the £500 third prize for The Awakening.
Ashani, Safah and Sophia also won places at the Tower Poetry Summer School for young poets, to be held in Oxford at the end of August.
The trio, whose schools received £150 each, were all presented with their awards at a ceremony held at Christ Church in Oxford last week.
Natasha Blinder, from South Hampstead High School in north-west London, Ed Pryor from Oundle School in Northamptonshire, and Grace Fraser, from Hartismere School in Eye, Suffolk, were shortlisted for the prize, receiving £250 each.
This year’s judges were the poets Alan Gillis and Peter McDonald and writer Katherine Rundell, whose second children’s novel, Rooftoppers, won the Waterstones children’s book prize in 2014.
Speaking about this year’s entries, Mr Gillis said: “I was struck first of all by the great range and diversity of work in terms of voice, style and subject matter. But overwhelmingly, I was impressed by the consistency of excellence. The experience of judging has been really uplifting because of the passion and daring, boldness and confidence of the poems entered.”
The competition, now in its 16th year, aims to encourage the writing and reading of poetry by young adults. It has built a reputation for discovering fresh and exciting poetry talent, with previous winners going on to develop successful writing careers. More than 11,000 young poets have entered the competition since it was launched in 2001.
To read the winning poems go to www.towerpoetry.org.uk
Winning poem: Flowers from the Dark by Ashani Lewis
She is quiet,
With skin as tight as the wheeling crows:
She kneels over the dirt and grows
The roses.
Your lawn chair holds a pale absence;
A tulip dies, falls back against the fence,
And decomposes.
You watch her.
(And from her fair and unpolluted flesh)
The shadows on the windowsill – fresh
Violets
Break up the clean square of light,
And, thoughtless, obstruct the sight
Of her silence.
She grows the flowers
For you. From loam and wombs,
The pits of eyes and empty rooms,
From hipbones,
Harpoons, moons and crows: everything dark –
Seaweed, oil, the time around stars;
And olive stones.