A poem inspired by the writer’s experience missing her son after he moved from the UK to Australia has won this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition.

Fiona Larkin’s poem, Absence has a grammar, was picked from nearly 22,000 entries.

“It feels a bit like a lottery win, because the odds are so high,” said Larkin. When she got the call with the news, she felt both a “sense of disbelief” and “weirdly buoyant – that floating sense of something happening”.

After her son moved to Brisbane, Larkin had been “really taken aback” by how much she missed him. “I rarely write about my children, I think they’ve maybe got one poem each now,” said Larkin. Her son hadn’t read the poem until Larkin found out she’d won the competition. “He’s delighted for me. I reckon he’s probably a little bit embarrassed as well.”

The poem incorporates the Finnish language, which Larkin had begun reading about before going to Helsinki last summer, around the time that her son moved. Her poem plays with the abessive case, which is used to express absence and involves adding the suffix -tta or -ttä on to nouns. “I’m really interested in the way knowledge of other languages shines a light on English,” she said.

Larkin’s debut collection, Rope of Sand, was published in 2023. She has also published two pamphlets, Vital Capacity and A Dovetail of Breath. Winning the competition “will give me more confidence with my writing going forward in terms of experimenting and trying out new things”. She is working on a second collection.

All the poems were read anonymously by a judging panel comprising Romalyn Ante, John McAuliffe and Stephen Sexton, who described the winning poem as “very impressive, ingenious and affecting”.

Matt Barnard was named as the runner-up, winning £2,000, while third place went to Sorrel Briggs, who receives £1,000. The top three poems will be published in the spring 2025 issue of the Poetry Society’s journal, The Poetry Review.

Seven commended poets, winning £500 each, are Yong-Yu Huang, Lee Knapper, Hannah Perrin King, Lesley Sharpe, Chris Beckett, Kit Buchan and Andrew Dennison.

Past winners of the competition include Carol Ann Duffy, Sinéad Morrissey, James Berry and Tony Harrison. Last year, Imogen Wade won the award for a poem inspired by her experience being mugged in New York. The competition will next open in June.

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Absence has a grammar

I am learning to use the abessive
case as if I were Finnish,
to indicate that what I miss
is so much a part of me
that its loss is structural.

The suffix -tta turns a word
into a shadow of itself.
Emptied of substance,
light blows through it.
I think of moonshine,

of a bottle of Koskenkorva,
the Finns’ national liquor,
renamed Koskenkorvatta
when there’s none left.
Koskenkorvatta, I howl.

Itkin syyttä means
‘I cried without reason,’
but when a child is away
there is reason enough.
Tonight itkin syyttä.

If I join -tta to son
it impels me to write this –
not a sonata, nor sonnet,
but still, of course,
a little song of longing.

With thanks to Diego Marani for Koskenkorvatta.