Many congratulations to Mimi Khalvati and Claudine Toutoungi, who have both been longlisted for the 2025 Jhalak Poetry Prize with their books Collected Poems and Emotional Support Horse!

The Jhalak Prize celebrates books from writers of colour whose work has been published in the UK and Ireland. This year, the Prize has expanded its lists to honour poetry with a dedicated award, with the three prizes now named the Jhalak Prose Prize, the Jhalak Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize.

The judges for the Jhalak Poetry Prize are poets Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker and Will Harris.

Harris said: 'This longlist demands to be looked at. These are 12 poetry books by writers of colour published at a time when fewer than 1% of students at GCSE level study a book by a writer of colour. These are books saying valuable things in unusual forms. Like all good poetry, each book is uniquely receptive to the speech of our time, finding out the spaces in language where ideology inserts itself and picking it apart.'

The shortlist will be revealed on 22nd April, with the winners announced on 4th June.

Read the announcement and full longlists in The Bookseller and on the prize website.

Well done to Mimi, Claudine, and all the other longlisted writers and publishers!

Emotional Support Horse by Claudine Toutoungi tracks the tragicomedy of grief, and out of low vision, bereavement and eco-stress blends poems of startling wit, verve and solace. A woman longs to transform into Nicola Walker in a cop car, or a Hungarian Vizsla, or just to find an equal footing with her doctor. Personal and planetary fractures blur in these vivid, dreamlike pages that will speak to anyone who has faced down confusion and rupture, when they strike. In part soulful, in part self-help, the poems veer between droll and despairing, their swings from high to low and back again reflecting a self adrift on a choppy sea. A self, however, not alone, but accompanied throughout by a host of other species. From earthworms to wolfhounds, flamingos to Konic ponies, the world of Emotional Support Horse flickers with light and life, charting sorrow's depths even as it stumbles upon joy.

Mimi Khalvati, one of our best-loved poets, was born in Tehran, Iran, and sent away to boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six, only returning to her family in Iran when she was seventeen. The loss of her native country, culture and mother tongue formed the bedrock of her adoptive love of the English language and its lyric tradition. 'But,' she says, 'whether drawing on my few memories of Iran, my long years in London and travelling in the Mediterranean, or on that central void always facing me, I have celebrated the richness of a life that can be lived without a clear sense of heritage, family history or personal biography.'

That wealth is reflected in the wide variety of style, tone and architecture in Collected Poems, comprised of her Carcanet poetry collections over thirty-three years – free and metrical verse, ranging from short, fixed forms to extended lyrical sequences, from ghazals to the heroic corona or book-length series of sonnets. 'I hope', she writes, 'the poems speak especially to those who have made their homes wherever the tide has brought them, sometimes in language itself, and to those who have no story but place their trust in the flux and flow, the vision of the lyric moment.'