Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets, a collection of prose poems responding to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward prize for best collection, beating other nominees in a competition judged by poet Shivanee Ramlochan.

Kennard said he started writing Sonnet 66 at a party and then got hooked on writing reactions to all 154 Sonnets.

Caleb Femi won the prize for best first collection for his work Poor, which explores the lives and times of a Peckham estate.

Femi’s debut book grabbed the judges from the first page. Nicole Sealey won the Forward prize for best single poem for Pages 22-29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.

Ramlochan praised the poem, saying that it shows there are poems embedded in all sorts of documents, and the jury said the poems showed how the poetic imagination can be bold, limitless, and reach deep into our lives.