Poets Vidyan Ravinthiran and Karen Solie were named joint winners of the 2025 Forward Prize for Poetry. (Neo Gilder)

Canadian poet Karen Solie has been named a joint winner of a 2025 Forward Prize for Poetry.

The annual awards, which celebrate new poetry in the U.K. and Ireland, were first awarded in 1992. They are granted in four categories, including for best collection. Solie was one of five poets shortlisted in July for the £10,000 ($18,638) Forward Prize for Best Collection for Wellwater, published in the U.K. by Picador (and in Canada by House of Anansi Press).

Solie and Vidyan Ravinthiran have been named joint winners of the prize, and will each receive £5,000 ($9,317) – a first in the prize’s 33-year history. Ravinthiran received the prize for Avidya, published by Bloodaxe Books.

Solie, who was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, teaches at St. Andrews University in Scotland and spends half the year in Canada.

“The dual winners of the Best Collection prize address unignorable crises – on one hand the environmental barbarism which may well finish us off, and on the other the collapse of a society into ethnic violence resulting in migration,” judge Sean O’Brien said in a press release. “If these books were merely topical they could hardly compete with the news media. But the poetic imagination, as Wordsworth wrote, enables us to ‘see into the life of things.’ We might add that poetry also reclaims the world from the merely habitual.”

The jury for this year’s prizes was comprised of chair Sarah Hall and poets Lisa Kelly, Hannah Lavery, O’Brien, and Rommi Smith. The winners were announced at a ceremony in London on Oct. 26.