Donate

Latest News

 

2025 Poetry and Short Story Main Competition Shortlist and Longlist released!

Click here to see the complete list.

The Forward Book Prize

The Forward Book of Poetry, an anthology of the best poems from 2024, includes poems from The Bedford Competition judges:

Rishi Dastidar, 2024 and 2025 Cygnature Poetry judge.
Fran Lock, 2025 Main Poetry judge.

Also several of our competition entrants are in the collection:

Damen O’Brien – Winner in 2022
Vanessa Lampert -Third Place in 2021 and shortlisted in 2020

We congratulate them and are proud to have our judges and poets represented in the most influential awards for new poetry published in the UK and Ireland.

https://forwardartsfoundation.org/book/the-forward-book-of-poetry-2024/

Scroll to Top
Fran Lock

Poetry Prize Judge

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and fourteen poetry collections. Her most recent collections are Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024, and ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). Spectres // Defectors /// No Respecters, an omnibus of three previous titles, with selected new material was published by Culture Matters in late 2024.Her most recent pamphlet is The New Herbal (Blueprint Press, 2024), and Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, a collection of essays exploring feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University 2022-2023 and is a Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters. She lives in Kent with her sassy American bully, Luna.