NEWS

The winners and runners-up of 2021’s Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics Prizes will be announced online on 16^th April at 7pm GMT.​​​​​​​

You can watch the announcement in a variety of ways:

• at our Keats-Shelley Prizes and Young Romantics pages.
• Twitter.
• Facebook.

Or you can watch below, via the Keats-Shelley House Youtube page.

The virtual Awards Ceremony - the 23rd such event - will be hosted by Prize Chair Simon Barnes – the acclaimed sports journalist, nature-writer and author of books about everything from Hong Kong to The Meaning of Birds.

Each competition has two categories: poems and essays. The main Keats-Shelley Prize is open to all; Young Romantics must be between 16 and 18 years old. The shortlists were selected by our two fantastic panels of Keats-Shelley Judges. Professor Deryn Rees-Jones and Will Kemp, who selected the poems, and Professors Sharon Ruston and Simon Bainbridge, who chose the essays.

• Read all the shortlisted poems and essays at the respective Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics webpages.​​​​​​​

The theme of 2021’s Poetry Prizes is ‘Writ in Water’. Our inspiration is John Keats’ gravestone in Rome, whose epitaph reads: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ The 2021 Young Romantics Prize is part of our wider KS200 programme, commemorating the bicentenary of John Keats’ death, aged just 25, on 23rd February 1821.

• Read our list of the Top 11 Writ in Waters: including graves, ambient music and tattoos.

The Young Romantic essayists were asked to address the question: ‘How can poetry – especially the poetry of John Keats and Percy Shelley – help us cope with adversity?’

• Listen to Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger talk to the Keats-Shelley Podcast about his life, career and how his love of John Keats inspired his monumental art installation ‘Writ in Water’, which commemorated the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta.