The shortlist has been released for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025, which recognizes "a single-author collection of poetry of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships." The award is run by English PEN, along with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the estate of Seamus Heaney. This year's winner will be named December 1 in Dublin. The PEN Heaney Prize shortlisted titles are:
Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi
No One Will Know You Tomorrow by Najwan Darwish, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Namanlagh by Tom Paulin
The Banquet by Stav Poleg
Wellwater by Karen Solie
Will Forrester, head of literature programmes at English PEN, said the shortlist "celebrates six collections which are--in words that recur in the judges' readings of them--deeply personal, deeply political, and deeply concerned with the power of poetry. This is a shortlist of singular works that find shared interests in language, land, love and loss--and in the social and political conditions that both animate those existential matters and are in turn animated by them. We hope readers newly finding these collections will be rearranged by them just as they have rearranged us."