Wes Lee, has been shortlisted for The Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize 2025 – 2026, in London.

The Keats-Shelley Prizes (£4000 prize pool) were established in 1998 by The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association in London. This year’s judges for poetry are Professor Deryn Rees-Jones and Will Kemp.

The theme of The Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize was chosen to mark the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, on the subject of either “Dystopia” or “Utopia”.

The six shortlisted poems were chosen by Professor Deryn Rees-Jones and Will Kemp, and can be read on The Keats-Shelley website.

The winners will be announced at The Keats-Shelley Awards 2025 – 2026, on April 23rd in London, by the chair of the judging panel, author, journalist and critic, Rupert Christiansen.

‘The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association was founded in 1903, based in London, the charity supports the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, where the English poet John Keats died in 1821. The house was purchased by the charity in 1906. Over the past century, the first-floor apartment has been transformed into a museum and library dedicated to the Romantic writers, above all those – Keats, PB and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron – with strong attachments to Italy.

The charity is also responsible for maintaining the graves of Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Joseph Severn and Edward Trelawny in the non-Catholic Cemetery at Testaccio.’