The 2026 Heaney Prize shortlisters (from top left): Daniel Sluman; Máighréad Medbh; Daniel Rice; (Bottom, from left): Tishani Doshi; Nur Turkmani; and Malgorzata Lebda.
By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief
English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, has announced the shortlist for the PEN Heaney Prize 2026.
The prize, now in its third year, recognizes “a single-author collection of poetry” published in the U.K. or Ireland “that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.” The award is open to writers of “any nationality or geographical location, including those whose work has been translated into English.”
The winner of this year’s PEN Heaney Prize will be announced on Tuesday, December 1, 2026 at a ceremony at the Howard Assembly Room, in Leeds, England, in partnership with the National Poetry Center. The 2026 prize judging panel includes 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.
The PEN Heaney Prize 2026 Shortlist:
Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi (Bloodaxe Books): Judges’ comment: “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 (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Judges’ comment: “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 (Macha Press): Judges’ comment: “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 (Fitzcarraldo Editions): Judges’ comment: “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 (Nine Arches Press): Judges’ comment: “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 (Hajar Press): Judges’ comment: “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.”
Previous winners of the award include Tom Paulin, who won the 2025 Prize for Namanlagh (Faber), his first collection in over a decade, which was announced at a ceremony at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin in December 2025, and Susannah Dickey, who was announced as the inaugural winner for her debut collection, ISDAL (Picador), which was awarded at Queen’s University Belfast, in 2024.