We send huge congratulations to Kevin Graham on winning The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025 for his poem ‘Aspiration’.
Together with Kevin we applaud The London Magazine Poetry Prize for supporting Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). This year the prize raised over £10,000.
Kevin’s forthcoming second collection, Time’s Guest, will be published in September by The Gallery Press.
Read more about the winners and judges on their website.
Kevin Graham lives with his family in Dublin and works in risk, specializing in environmental liability. He graduated from Dublin City University with a BSc in Applied Computational Linguistics.
His poems have appeared widely in print as well as on radio and he has received Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland. He has published an e-chapbook with Smithereens Press and a pamphlet, First Impressions, with Ragpicker Poetry. His debut collection, The Lookout Post, published by The Gallery Press in 2023, has been shortlisted for the Pollard Prize.
‘KEVIN GRAHAM’S CONTEMPLATIVE and accomplished debut collection The Lookout Post uses nature—broadly conceived— to great effect, yet it is especially preoccupied with bodies of water. Braiding together life and death, many of these poems represent thought, memory, and experience in relation to the aquatic, which is element, symbol, and metaphor all at once . . . In multiple poems, Graham shows himself a consummate elegist . . . Offering well-crafted examinations of lived experience as well as death, and sifting through the sediments both leave in memory, The Lookout Post is an assured debut displaying a considerable sense of poetic maturity.
— Christopher Cusack, Irish Literary Supplement
