Pocketry is pleased to announce Sophia Riozzi as the 2020 Pocketry Prize for Unpublished Poets winner with her collection, Year of the Double Autumn.

Sophia's collection will be published in an instant book by Pocketry in early 2021 and will be available to purchase in Pocketry's online shop.

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There were three highly commended entries:

Lorikeets by Steph Amir,

Stray Perceptions by Melissa Favasuli and

Pandemic 575: A Collection of Haiku for the Year 2020 by Megan Riedl.

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The standard of the entries was high and I have to thank all the amazing poets who were brave enough to send in their work. It takes courage to share your poetry with other people, more so when you are exposing yourself to rejection. There as a lot of promise in the submitted poems and it was an honour to read poets at the start of their career. 

In this year’s entries I saw poets with a keen eye for people and the world around them. Themes and subjects of the collections included the pandemic, the prison system, homelessness, animals and insects, the environment, connection, love, grief, ageing and beer. It was wonderful to see poets try different forms including sonnets, free verse, couplets, haikus, quatrains and tercets as well as a using a range of poetic devices such as rhyme, metaphor, personification and simile.

In judging the prize, I was looking for poems that were relatable, universal and spoke to the experience of being human. The poems that stood out used evocative language, vivid images and had a strong sense time / place / personality. They also had a solid grasp of form and demonstrated various poetic devices including enjambment, metaphor and rhyme.

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Thank you to all the poets who submitted their entries for the inaugural Pocketry Prize for Unpublished Poets. It was pleasing to see so many emerging poets writing to such a high standard.