We’re thrilled to announce that the winner of The White Review Poet’s Prize 2022, run in partnership with CHEERIO, is Fahad Al-Amoudi. 

His poem ‘The Old Justice’ is available to read on our website, and his portfolio will appear in a forthcoming print issue of The White Review.

The winner is awarded £2,500, editorial feedback and publication of their winning portfolio in a print edition of The White Review.

It is testament to the quality of the shortlist that the judges chose also to recognise and commend a second outstanding portfolio, by Nina Reljić. Her poem ‘Halloween in America’ is also available to read.

Al-Amoudi’s portfolio was picked by poets Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions and founder of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour, Nisha Ramayya, author of States of the Body Produced by Love and Jay Gao, author of Imperium and a White Review contributing editor, from a shortlist of eight. The titles were selected from more than 200 total entries.

The judges said: ‘From the very first image in Fahad Al-Amoudi’s portfolio, there was a poetic vision that felt distinctly accomplished and mature. We were excited by the mixture of tradition, fabulation, allusion and anecdote, held by Al-Amoudi’s poetic variations and swept away by the generosity of his command. Through Al-Amoudi’s ability to weave together tender storytelling and lyric surprise, darkness and lightness, these poems manage to craft an intense richness of the poetic world under close and perceptive examination.

We would also like to commend Nina Reljić for complex and playful poetry that contorts to see beyond its frame, trying things out in words and images, from other consciousnesses to other narrative possibilities.’

On behalf of CHEERIO, poetry editor Martha Sprackland added: ‘Fahad Al-Amoudi’s poems, though rooted in the specificity of family and place, come with the trappings of myth. They are restless and talkative, alert always to the minute details of the world – the movements of insects, the intricacy of jewellery, the bloom and spoil of fruit – and they take great pleasure in the play of sound and language. From a particularly strong field of entries, Al-Amoudi’s portfolio is an impressive winner.’

Last year’s prize was won by Kandace Siobhan Walker, whose portfolio is published in The White Review Issue 32, which is out now. The judges were Jay Bernard, Emily Berry and Kayo Chingonyi.