King Charles awards His Majesty’s Gold Medal for Poetry

King Charles III awarded His Majesty’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2025.

The winner is Michael Laskey BEM.

Michael Laskey’s first publication, ‘Cloves of Garlic’ (1988), was a joint winner of The Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. Since then, six full poetry collections have been published. ‘Thinking of Happiness’ (1991) and ‘The Tightrope Wedding’ (1999) were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations, and ‘The Tightrope Wedding’ was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

‘Permission to Breathe’ (2004) was followed by ‘The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems’ (2008), ‘Weighing the Present’ (2014) and ‘Between Ourselves’ (2022). Last month, Michael Laskey’s ‘Collected Poems’ was published, bringing together all his published works.

Michael Laskey said, “I was completely astonished and am still finding it hard to believe. I never imagined my poems would receive such extraordinary public recognition or that my name could ever appear on the same list as some of the poets whose work I’ve looked up to and loved for years.”

The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, added: “Michael is an incredibly gifted poet and is highly deserving of The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Reading through Collected Poems, I was struck by how deceptively simple the poems are — apparently effortless, domestic, calm in voice and clear in their descriptions and observations — yet so often, in fact almost always, deeply moving, with last lines that cause an involuntary intake of breath, a wobble of the heart, or a shiver of the spine.

The Gold Medal for Poetry was established by King George V in 1933 and is awarded for excellence in poetry.