Congratulations to Christine Roseeta Walker, who has been shortlisted for the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize with Coco Island!

The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize is for an outstanding debut collection of poetry in the English language. Valued at €10,000, the prize is sponsored by the John Pollard Foundation, and administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Trinity in April 2025.

Announcing the 2025 shortlist, chair of the judging panel, Professor Eoin McNamee, Director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre said:

'As always it is a privilege for myself and fellow judges Tom Walker and Una Mannion to read and debate the work of these poets in their first collections. There is a rigour, political alertness and attention to beauty to this year's shortlist, a necessary sense of worlds being made anew. The future isn’t assured but sometimes it is in better hands than we think.'

The full shortlist can be found here.

Well done to Christine, and all the other shortlisted writers and publishers!

Christine Roseeta Walker's first book is set entirely in Negril, Jamaica. Coco Island presents a compelling cycle of poems, attentive to the undertow and hidden forces that shape a place and its people. In narrative poems, in songs, in fables, in comic scenes, ghost stories and vivid character sketches – especially of girls and women – Walker artfully lays bare how economic necessity, religious belief, illness and addiction reach far into the structures of family life and community. Piecing together the isolated lives of those left behind as the island modernises, her fearless, memorable poems chart the devastation of a world.