Introduction “I was particularly struck by the number of poems that reflected on the complexities of living at this particular moment in time rather than taking their cue from poems and contexts of the past.” – Kayo Chingonyi, Judge 2017 Welcome to the winners’ anthology for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2017. Since 1998 the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award has been finding, celebrating and supporting the very best young poets from around the world. Founded by The Poetry Society, the award has been supported by the Foyle Foundation since 2001 and is firmly established as the key competition for young poets aged between 11 and 17 years. This year we received almost 11,000 poems from over 6,000 young poets from across the UK and around the world. Writers from 72 different countries entered the competition, from as far afield as Brazil, Japan, Syria and Zimbabwe. From these poems this year’s judges, Kayo Chingonyi and Sinéad Morrissey, selected 100 winners, made up of 15 top poets and 85 commended poets. The scale and global reach of the competition demonstrates what a huge achievement it is to be selected as one of our winners. This anthology features poems by the top 15 winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2017 and celebrates the names of the 85 commended poets (whose work is available in an online anthology, see p. 28). Judge Sinéad Morrissey says: “The best of the entries were incredibly impressive – so much more sophisticated and nuanced than the writing I did when I was a teenager. There was great maturity of
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