Oxfordshire poet Vanessa Lampert won from 2,524 entries, 354 of them from Hampshire. David Spencer took the prize for the best poem by a Hampshire poet.

Vanessa Lampert, a poet from Oxfordshire, has won the Winchester Poetry Prize 2026 with her poem The Rub. The result was announced at The ARC in Winchester on Saturday 10 October, at the end of Winchester Poetry Day, and livestreamed.

The festival published the full results on 15 October (Winchester Poetry Festival). The competition drew 2,524 entries. Of those, 354 came from Hampshire, and there were entries from more than 50 countries, including Cape Verde, Iran, Ghana, Malaysia, Georgia and China.

The winners

Prize Poet Poem
First prize, £1,000 Vanessa Lampert The Rub
Second prize, £500 Russell Buzby Hecuba
Third prize, £250 Miriam Swales The Bleeding Woman
Kathryn Bevis Prize, best poem by a Hampshire-based poet David Spencer Across The River

The prize amounts are from the festival’s competition page.

The Kathryn Bevis Prize is the county’s own award inside the competition. It goes to the strongest poem entered by a poet based in Hampshire, which this year meant the best of those 354 local entries.

Judged blind

Every entry was read and judged anonymously by the poet Julia Copus, a former pupil of Peter Symonds College. She revealed the winners on stage and talked through each poem. Entrants were told not to put their name anywhere on a poem.

Copus has published four collections. Her collection Girlhood (Faber, 2019) won the inaugural Derek Walcott Prize in the United States, according to the festival. Longlisted poets travelled from as far as Australia for the announcement, and those abroad joined online. A grant from Newbury Building Society paid for the livestream.

“Winning the Winchester prize is thrilling but the whole prizegiving event is a gift,” Vanessa Lampert said in the festival’s announcement. “Everything felt wonderfully alive.”

What it means for you

  • You can read the poems. The winning, commended and highly commended poems are in an anthology called The Habits Of Strangers. The festival sells it through its online shop, and P&G Wells Bookshop in Winchester stocks it.
  • You can enter next year, if it runs. The festival says the 2027 prize “will open in April next year (subject to funding)”. This year’s entry fee was £7 for a first poem and £5 for each one after it.
  • Low income is no bar. The festival runs a Pay It Forward scheme, in which entrants who can afford it pay for a free entry for a poet on a low income.

The day also included the Hampshire Young Poets competition, run with Hampshire Cultural Trust, a sold-out writing workshop and an open mic. The prize is sponsored by Paris Smith LLP, The Writing School Online and Oliver Golding, and Winchester Poetry Festival is a registered charity (number 1150997). There is more to do in the city in our What’s On guide for this month.

Sources