Poetry SchoolThe Poetry School and UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage are delighted to announce the winner of The Laurel Prize 2026 is Fiona Benson for her collection Midden Witch (Jonathan Cape).
Fiona has been awarded £5,000 and a four-night writing retreat in mid-Wales courtesy of 2026 prize partners Write Within.
WHAT THE JUDGES SAY
“Fiona Benson’s Midden Witch is a spellbinding collection that changes the way you see the natural world around you. Her witches, healers and outcasts carry knowledge of plants, animals, remedies and landscape that history tried hard to forget, and in her hands that knowledge feels alive. This is not just a book about our connection to nature. It shows how poetry can bring that world back into view with a clarity that feels both ancient and newly made.”
David Morley, Poet and 2026 Judge (Chair).
ABOUT MIDDEN WITCH
In her thrilling fourth collection, Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters the world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic and focuses on the persistent superstition – the fear and false knowledge – that was witchcraft.
Telling tales of imagined transformations and spell-casting, these poems present a litany of artists, dreamers and outcasts and a study of their ostracisation. The poet looks at how gifted, sometimes troubled, individuals – generally healers, artists, prodigies and almost always women – became scapegoats, victims of societal paranoia and persecution, and were hounded for centuries, often to a gratuitously violent public execution.
In Midden Witch, these women speak back to us with dark humour, insight and real herbal knowledge. Reckoning with middle age, marginalisation, perimenopause and a steady, unstoppable vanishing, this troubled codex of remedies, spells and stories speaks to human fear in the face of the unknown, and a drive to protect our loved ones that transcends all rational thought. At play in the language of archival accounts of witchcraft, this is a dark, eclectic spell-book that witnesses the end-days of magic.
ABOUT FIONA
Fiona Benson lives in Devon with her husband and their two daughters. Midden Witch is her fourth collection and was preceded by Bright Travellers (Seamus Heaney Prize for First Collection, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), Vertigo & Ghost (Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection), and Ephemeron. She has recently contributed as editor and poetry translator to Artur Dron’s We Were Here and Yaryna Chornohuz’s Dasein (both with Jantar Press); she is currently working on Fedir Rudyi’s debut collection The Position with co-translator Victor Shepelev. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The 2026 Shortlist
Ethnology by Cathy Galvin (Bloodaxe Books)
Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne (Graywolf Press)
Tipping Point by Jane Lovell (Night River Wood)
The Storm’s Flora by Laura Wainwright (Seren Books)
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