Damen O’Brien, an Australian poet with a string of awards to his name, has won the International Prize at the 2026 Wigtown Poetry Prizes for his poem The Edge. This year’s winners, announced at the start of October, come from Galloway, Fife, Surrey, Australia and Canada, with poets from Scotland, Denmark and New Zealand among those shortlisted.
The runner-up in the international category was Aileen Lees, a Thai-British writer and artist based in Perthshire and founder of Decolonising the Outdoors, for Question for the two apple trees on the M90. The Scots Prize went to William Hershaw of Fife for The Seaman and Saint Brendan, ahead of Donald Adamson, originally from Dumfries and now living in Finland, with Leadhills Miners’ Library. In Gaelic, Sgàire Uallas (Zachary Wallace), a lawyer and writer from Ontario with an interest in Celtic folklore, won with Mac-ghnìomhara, and Edinburgh poet Marcas Mac an Tuairneir was runner-up with Dolaran. Maureen Jivani from Surrey took the Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize for Alma in the Blue, written after the sudden death of her daughter, and Newton Stewart teacher Fiona Lindsay won the Dumfries and Galloway Fresh Voice Award for her collection Becoming.
Now in their 21st year, the prizes are run by the Wigtown Festival Company and attract hundreds of entries from around the world. The Scots and Gaelic categories drew strong fields this year. Niall O’Gallagher, who judged the Gaelic award, pointed to the wide range of poetic forms, including what he believes may be the first Cornish sonnet written in Gaelic. Ruth Padel judged the pamphlet prize, which rewards a collection of up to 12 poems, while Marjorie Lotfi judged the Fresh Voice Award for unpublished poets in Dumfries and Galloway.
Organisers say the prizes can make a lasting difference. Last year’s international winner, Molly Thapviwat, a Thai-American poet based in Bangkok, said the award helped her believe in where her writing could take her. In the year since, her poems have appeared in Guernica, Arc Poetry Magazine and Frontier Poetry, she has won a Pushcart Prize, and her first short story has been accepted for publication.
Nicholas Walker, a trustee of the Wigtown Festival Company, said the prizes would keep looking for poems that deal with both the hard and the joyful sides of life. Writing in The Scotsman, where six poets contributed essays over six weeks ahead of the announcement, he said growing concern about artificial intelligence makes human creativity and authentic voice more valuable. He suggested the prizes may increasingly see their role as protecting writing that comes from “human empathy, spiritual depth and genuine experience”. The winning poems can be read at wigtownpoetryprize.com.
