Poetry competition ahead of Winnie-the-Pooh centenary
The Ashdown Forest Foundation is partnering with the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) to launch the 2025 Ashdown Forest poetry competition this summer.
The competition will run until Friday, August 15 and comes ahead of the 2026 centenary celebrations for A A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Ashdown Forest was the setting for many of Milne’s classic Pooh stories and continues to inspire writers and artists today.
The theme this year will be Connections, and the competition is open to professional and emerging poets, with separate categories for adults and teens. The Foundation received over 200 entries in its inaugural year.
Beth Morgan, head of engagement at Ashdown Forest, said, “This is a particularly exciting time for the Forest. We are just one year away from celebrating the centenary of the classic Pooh stories, which have served as a reminder of the importance of mindfulness and connection to nature.
“We have chosen Connections as the theme because it is a sweeping topic, with scope to explore our connections to nature, to each other and to ourselves. This may include family relationships, connections to animals and nature or to something more philosophical.”
On the new partnership, RLF chief executive Edward Kemp said: “We are delighted to partner with Ashdown Forest for this year’s poetry competition. Our histories have been entwined ever since Ashdown resident AA Milne bequeathed a share of his literary estate to the RLF, a generous bequest that has enabled us to support many hundreds of writers, including many poets, who have benefited from our hardship grants and education programmes. The theme of Connections is highly appropriate given this shared heritage.”
This year's judges will be Kathryn Aalto (Ashdown Forest Foundation trustee) and Fiona Sampson (RLF trustee). Kathryn is a New York Times bestselling author, educator, speaker, garden historian, and designer, whose work bridges the realms of nature, culture, and storytelling. Fiona is a British poet, literary biographer and writer. She is best known for her poetry, which has received many international prizes in the US and the UK.
Winners will be announced on National Poetry Day, Thursday, October 3, and will be invited to a photoshoot at the Ashdown Forest Centre at Wych Cross in Sussex at the end of October.
The competition is free to enter, and applications can be submitted online via Ashdown Forest’s Poetry Competition webpage, where you can also view conditions of entry.