Cultural highlights 2025: Poetry Roundup

As we say hello to 2026, we reflect upon some of the most exciting poetry developments from across Wales last year. From fresh new publications to awards, events and collaborations, these highlights point to a varied and vibrant literary landscape

Afonydd

In May, inclusive independent publisher Arachne Press released Afonydd, an anthology of Welsh writing on rivers. The collection brings together fifty poets writing in dialogue with the rivers of Wales, considering their histories, presences and futures.

Following the success of 2022’s A470: Poems for the Road / Cerddi’r Ffordd, the anthology is presented as fully bilingual, with editors Sian Northey and Ness Owen giving equal prominence to work written in Cymraeg and English.

At a time when Welsh rivers face increasing environmental pressure, Afonydd feels like a timely and necessary contribution to the changing landscape of contemporary Welsh poetry.

Beyond / Tŷ Hwnt

In a strong year for anthologies in Wales, Lucent Dreaming made history with Beyond / Tŷ Hwnt: Anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled Writers, the first of its kind to be published in Wales. Edited by Bethany Handley, Megan Angharad Hunter and Sioned Erin Hughes, the collection features new prose and poetry by 29 emerging and established writers, including Matthew Haigh, Joshua Jones and current Seren and Poetry Wales editor Zoe Brigley.

With deaf and disabled people in Wales often left feeling marginalised within cultural spaces, the anthology provides a dedicated platform for voices that are frequently unheard and underserved to advocate for and celebrate themselves.

Rhian Elizabeth

Maybe I’ll Call Gillian Anderson is Rhian Elizabeth’s second collection with West Wales-based independent publisher Broken Sleep Books. Appearing just a year after girls etc (2024), the book continues to showcase Elizabeth’s distinctive humour and irony. Her voice remains clear and assured as she writes through experiences of womanhood, motherhood, queerness and daily life, moving between darkness, vulnerability and resilience.

In a year of continued recognition, Elizabeth won the 2025 Wales Book of the Year Award in the English-language poetry category, as well as the Nation.Cymru People’s Choice Award, both for girls etc.

Poetry Wales

Founded in 1965 by Meic Stephens, Poetry Wales celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2025. The year-long commemorative programme included brand new commissions, a cultural exchange with Zimbabwean poets, and a whole suite of special features and events.

The Spring 2025 issue (60.3) featured work in English and Welsh from sixty of Wales’s finest emerging poets, work that editor Zoe Brigley has described as shaping the future direction of Welsh poetry. Alongside new voices, the anniversary issues also included a clutch of mini reviews by former editors and features including interviews with ‘the rockstar of American poetry’ Eileen Myles and Wales women’s football poet laureate Sarah McCreadie.

Menna Elfyn

This summer, poet, playwright and essayist Menna Elfyn released Let the World’s People Sing, a trilingual poetry collection drawing on work from across her career. The volume gathers poems from earlier collections including Perffaith Nam / Perfect Blemish (2006), Murmur (2012) and Bondo (2017), alongside poems from her previous anthologies.

Originally written in Welsh, the work has been translated into Arabic by Rawan Sukkar and Lara Matta, with English translations by Gillian Clarke, Elin ap Hywel, Damian Walford Davies and Paul Henry. Together, these poems are careful and compassionate, concerned with fostering understanding in an uncertain political climate and challenging injustice wherever it arises.

In October, Elfyn also published Parch (Welsh for ‘Respect’), her sixth collection in a long and lasting partnership with Bloodaxe. For the first time, many of the poems have been written directly in English.

New Welsh Review

Licking their wounds after the loss of their funding back in 2024, The New Welsh Review entered into a major new publishing partnership with Parthian Books. Summer 2025 saw the relaunch of the magazine at Swansea’s Elysium bar and gallery, alongside the appointment of Susie Wild as the magazine’s new editor.

Redesigned and revitalised, Issue 138 featured work by several award-winning poets, including Seren author Abeer Ameer, who won the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written) for ‘At Least’, a meditation on violence, loss and language in the context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Sophie Buchaillard

Sophie Buchaillard’s debut poetry collection Painting Over the Cracks embodies the same precision, control and attentiveness that characterise her prose. A former Bridport Prize winner and Wales Book of the Year shortlist nominee, Buchaillard draws fruitfully from her own experiences alongside the testimonies of other survivors to explore abuse, shame, friendship and recovery.

The poems drift between the personal and the collective, alert to moments of listening and shared vulnerability, allowing difficult material to emerge without sensationalism.

At its core, this work highlights the possibilities of language and the power of human connection as a condition for survival.

Rae Howells

In September following a spirited campaign by The Gower Society and the Open Spaces Society, Deputy First Minister of Wales Huw Irranca-Davies rejected a planning application to build 56 homes on part of Swansea’s West Cross Common.

The decision represents a small but meaningful moment in relation to Rae Howells’s second collection, This Common Uncommon (2024), which documents her growing connection to the land as she became embroiled in efforts to protect it.

The book acts as a love letter to a richly wild space in the city’s margins. Howell’s affecting lyric conjures the natural magic of the common, its complex and delicate ecosystems, and the web of human lives and stories intertwined with it. In the wake of September’s decision, the collection takes on new power, acting as a talisman for the ongoing relationship between poetry, place and environmental stewardship.