One of the world’s highly respected poets, Imtiaz Dharker, will be the judge of the 2025 Guernsey International Poetry Competition (Poems on the Move), which is launched this week.

The competition, which is part of the Guernsey Literary Festival, attracted a record number of more than 3000 entries last year. It truly lived up to its ‘international’ status, with entries from 49 countries, including UK, Australia, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Japan, Nigeria, Taiwan, Aland Islands and UAE.

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film maker and has published seven collections of poetry, including her latest, Shadow Reader. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, and has been Chancellor of Newcastle University since 2020.

Her poems have featured on BBC radio, television, the London Underground, Glasgow billboards and Mumbai buses. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.

Imtiaz will host a presentation and reading event for the all the winners on Friday 2 May 2025, during the Guernsey Literary Festival, which runs from 25 April to 4 May. She will also be doing a reading event of her own poems and speaking in local schools.

Filter judge Candy Neubert was born in Guernsey. Her poetry collections Channel and Island are inspired by Guernsey.

The competition is divided into three classes: Open (which carries a first prize of £1000), Channel Islands (£250) and Young Poet (£250). There will also be cash prizes for second and third in each class. These poems will be part of the Poems on the Move display, at Guernsey Airport and other island sites and 21 poems will be chosen to be part of the Poems on the Buses display.

The competition is sponsored by Specsavers and supported by Guernsey Arts. Co-founder of competition sponsors Specsavers Dame Mary Perkins said, “We were so delighted that the competition attracted no fewer than 3000 entries in 2024 from such a diverse range of poets and so many countries. It’s an event with which Specsavers definitely enjoys being involved.”

Iona Roisin, a British artist and poet based in Helsinki, Finland, scooped the £1000 first prize in the open section of the 2024 competition. Iona was one of the winners who came to Guernsey for the presentation and reading event during the 2024 Festival.

A list of previous judges for competition, includes Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, Kate Clanchy, Ian MacMillan, Maura Dooley, Daljit Nagra and Gwyneth Lewis. Last year’s judge was Paul Muldoon.

Both top places in the Channel Islands section went to Guernsey this year. First prize was awarded to Theodore Cross for his poem After Guernesiais, and second to Shaun Shackleton for Goit. After Guernesiais will be on display on the Market Steps from this week.

Channel Islands winner Theo said, ‘I had wanted to write about the rapid decline of Guernesiais for a while, how it’s only been in two or three generations. I wanted to do this by looking at my maternal lineage which is the Guernsey side of my family.’

‘Other than that I think I wanted to express some of the profound weirdness of Guernsey’s ritual landscape and the almost mythic dimension that this lost language has for me and others that I know.’

‘I was glad to win and I hope that soon the conversation about Guernesiais will become more serious as it seems to me we are reaching a crucial point.’

The closing date for the competition, which is for poems of a maximum of 14 lines on one side of A4, is 15 January 2025. More details, rules and entry instructions are on the competition website, www.poemsonthemove.com, or on leaflets which can be found at a number of sites in the Channel Islands including libraries and local schools. Details will also be in the UK magazine Poetry Review and a number of other national and international poetry and literary magazines and websites.