Theresa Lola and Mary O’Malley Share This Yr’s Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
British-Nigerian author Theresa Lola has been named the joint winner of the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry for her assortment Ceremony For The Anonymous. She shares this 12 months’s prize with Mary O’Malley, who earns the honours for her e book The Shark Nursery.
The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is awarded yearly to a full-length e book of poems revealed within the earlier calendar 12 months by a residing poet wherever on the planet who will not be a U.S. citizen. The e book have to be in English or in English translation, and will have been revealed wherever on the planet. The prize features a $2,000 money award. Within the case of translations, the prize cash could also be shared by the poet and the translator.
For this 12 months, the $2,000 prize will probably be break up evenly between the 2 winners.
Theresa Lola was appointed the Younger Individuals’s Laureate for London (2019–20). In 2018, she was awarded the Brunel Worldwide African Poetry Prize. She holds an M.St in Artistic Writing from the College of Oxford. In 2022, her poem “Equilibrium” from her debut poetry assortment In Search of Equilibrium, was added to OCR’s GCSE English Literature syllabus.
Far-reaching and musical, Lola’s e book, Ceremony for the Anonymous (revealed by Penguin Books), explores the act of naming and its function in shaping our identities, aspirations, and sense of belonging. She conjures and questions the realities of her twin Nigerian-British id; traces the lineages of names; asks why some need to be named whereas others are handled as if invisible; and explores how our journey by way of life would possibly require us to solid off previous expectations, each others’ and our personal—simply as at different instances it will possibly convey us again, surprisingly and unexpectedly, to the place we first started.
Discover out extra in regards to the Derek Walcott Prize right here.