News: The winners of our Togetherness Poetry Challenge
Today - 21 March - is UN World Poetry Day! What better day to announce the winners of the Togetherness Poetry Challenge.
Poetry has a magical way of connecting us, giving us a way to explore our innermost emotions and make sense of the world around us in a peaceful yet honest way. That’s why, as part of our national Steps to Togetherness movement, we invited anyone and everyone to write a poem on the theme of Togetherness. In the second year of the challenge, we honed the theme further, inviting people to explore our country’s rich mix of shared identities and even digging deeper to understand how we can decolonise our minds. In these divided times, we wanted to create meaningful opportunities for people to use poetry to better understand the thoughts, feelings and impact of our cultural history and diverse society.
In the second year of our Poetry Challenge, we wanted to encourage more people who had never written a poem before to put pen to paper. We wanted to go one step further than inviting people, and actively support them, so we delivered a number of poetry-writing workshops across the country working through 15 Togetherness partners (for example, you can read more about a series of workshops we ran for Mums here).
The response to the challenge was overwhelming. We received over 630 poems from poets from different walks of life and experience levels across the UK and further afield. Our esteemed panel of judges (read more about them below) had the tough job to pick just six winners whose poems best responded to the Challenge’s themes from an anonymous shortlist list of poems drawn up by our in-house poet Ovyuki and volunteer Brad Young.
We are now delighted to announce the winners…..
….drum roll please…….
Overall Winner (prize £500):
Monday de Wolfe
Exhibit: East - A rhapsody on Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’
Runners up (prize £100):
A.S.
Threads
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Lima Sadiyah
Limbs of One
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Melissa Shand
The Common Frequency
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Monica Minott
Becoming a Creole Tree
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Zcott Zorilla
Brown Skin Pride
Our congratulations to all of our winners who have been notified and their prize money is on its way to them.
Congratulations also to the following poets whose poems were also highly commended:
Jin Tian
Unvarnished
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Predescu Georgia-Ofelia
Who taught me to look down on myself?
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Rita Matthee
The Fabric of Us
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Zoh
Boundless Horizons
What now?
The collection of winning poems and highly commended poems has been published as a digital anthology.
The Poetry Challenge is taking a ‘fallow year’ in 2026, but that doesn’t mean we are taking a break from poetry! We are keen to encourage even more people to explore and share their experiences through poetry and will be working with our partners to deliver poetry workshops across the country including as part of UNITED East End’s 90th anniversary of the Battle for Cable Street in east London and with our friends at the Modern Cockney Festival. We also plan to share Poems of Togetherness through our social media channels as part of our Steps to Togetherness movement. We’d love it if you were part of this activity:
If you are a grassroots organisation and you’d like us to deliver a poetry workshop, do get in touch. We’d love to work with you!
If you have written a poem on the theme of togetherness that you’d like us to share on Instagram, tag us (@stepstotogetheness) in your post and we will give it some love! Or send us footage of you reading your poem and we will share it for you!
A huge thank you…..
…to our wonderful panel of judges who gave up their precious time to read, absorb and assess the poems submitted. We have been honoured to work with such talent.
Aminah Rahman
Aminah is an award-winning poet and spoken word artist, born and raised in Cambridge. She has loved writing and performing on stage from a young age. Aminah has performed at many events.
Aminah performed at the BBC Make a Difference awards ceremony in 2023. She also performed at the England and Wales Cricket Board's (ECB) first-ever Iftar at Lord's Cricket Ground in 2022. Aminah was commissioned by BBC Asian Network to write and perform a poem celebrating 50 years of Bangladesh independence. She has also worked with the official International Women's Day team. Aminah represented Cambridgeshire at the BBC Upload Festival 2020, a festival showcasing talent from across England and the Channel Islands.
Aminah won the Young Muslim Writers Awards Key Stage 2 Poetry category in 2015. In 2017, and was the joint-winner of the Cambridge News and Media Education Awards: Pupil of the Year.
Elizabeth Cook
Elizabeth Cook is a poet, fiction writer, and librettist, interested in the ways in which the past is continually being re-fashioned and re-known. Poetry collections include: When I kiss the sky (2021) and she has won many poetry competitions, and is now a judge for poetry competitions as well.
She lives in East London, and practises as a Christian, drawn to Franciscanism. Achilles (Methuen 2001) moves from the Homeric Bronze Age to Keats in the nineteenth century while Lux (Scribe, 2019) takes a story from the Hebrew Scriptures through to the English Tudors. She has collaborated with composers and was librettist for Francis Grier’s oratorio, The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth (Radio 3, 2006).
Shasta Hanif Ali
Shasta is a poet navigating race and heritage; where meditations of memory and language interlace and disrupt. Shasta’s writing is widely published including in Mslexia, Silver Press and Renard Press. She is a winner of the 2024 Candlestick Press Light Poems Competition and the Edinburgh 900 Poetry Competition 2025. Shasta was nominated as one of Edinburgh’s 100 trail blazing women.
We’d also like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to two very special people, without whom we would not have been able to run our Poetry Challenge:
Ovyuki
Our resident poet, Ovyuki has supported us to develop and promote the Poetry Challenge and leads on delivering our Poetry Workshops.
Born and raised in London, Ovyuki is a poet, spoken word artist, host, photographer, and producer. She is known for her unique approach to poetry, including her spoken word, blending the flavours of the 90’s era influence of spoken word and hip hop bringing forth a futuristic sound to her audience.
She is the founder of the poetry business Hidden Literature, through which she cultivates a vibrant creative community via open mics, workshops, and collaborative projects.
She has worked with respected organisations including The O2, American Express, the National Trust, Firmoo, Barking & Dagenham Libraries and many more, delivering poetry projects and events for both local communities and corporate audiences.
Ovyuki regularly performs her poetry, offers bespoke writing services, and facilitates workshops and open mic events, with recent partners including the National Trust and Grow, Hackney.
Brad Young
Brad has played a pivotal (voluntary) role in the Togetherness Poetry Challenge across more than two years. Working closely with the CST team and Ovyuki he has helped with shortlisting and guiding the panel of poets in their final selections.
Brad is a community podcaster based in Suffolk. A former teacher, he has been involved in community radio for many years presenting music programmes on a variety of community stations in Suffolk. After retiring from teaching, Brad briefly worked as manager of community media projects in Ipswich, before deciding to set up a community podcast as an experiment in his village.
Along with his colleague Sam, Brad also provides training in the skills of interviewing and editing for anyone who wants to develop their own podcasts, through their CIC Gift Wrapped Media.
