Verse and Voice Competition
We were delighted to work in collaboration with the Sir John Soane’s Museum for our 2026 Competition, which was free for everyone to enter, of any age. We received hundreds and hundreds of excellent entries from across the world, from South Africa to South Korea, via Southend and Switzerland.
Sir John Soane’s Museum is a national museum, displaying the extraordinary collections of renowned British architect Sir John Soane, including antiquities, furniture, sculptures, architectural models and drawings and paintings, and we curated ten classical objects to inspire poets to respond creatively in written or spoken verse.
We were very grateful to our fantastic judges; please note that our judges cannot provide individual feedback.
Helen Dorey, MBE – Deputy Director and Inspectress of Sir John Soane’s Museum
Regarded as one of the leading scholars of Sir John Soane, Helen joined the Museum in 1986 and has been its Inspectress since 1995. She has published extensively on the Museum and its collections and has led numerous restoration projects within the Museum over 30 years, including the restoration of Soane’s private apartments and the Drawing Office. She is a member of the Council of the Attingham Trust and of the Advisory Council of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to heritage and is very much looking forward to seeing these creative responses to Soane’s collection.
Barney Norris – Award-winning writer
Barney Norris is a writer whose plays include Visitors, Eventide, Nightfall, The Remains of the Day and Second Best. His novels include Five Rivers, Met On A Wooded Plain and Undercurrent. His work has received the International Theatre Institute’s Award for Excellence, the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, a South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award, an Evening Standard Progress 1000 Award, a Betty Trask Award, the Northern Ireland One Book Award and a Hawthornden Literary Foundation award, and been translated into nine languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Oxford, and regularly reviews fiction for the Guardian. In 2026, his new book for Sting’s The Last Ship will tour the world.
Age Categories
We were thrilled to welcome some of our winning poets to the Museum to perform their pieces, alongside the fascinating objects that inspired them. Very well done to those who performed and showcased their work.
The Objects
Click each link to find out more about the history of the object.
- Statuette of a Lar (Roman Household God)
The Results
Junior (aged 11 and under)
- First Place – Sam Wilkinson-Thorpe
- Second Place – Turner Andrews
- Third Place – Matilda Wakefield
Senior (aged 12-18)
- First Place – Scarlett Morgan
- Second Place – Dayeon Lee
- Third Place – Annabella Rose Malhotra
- Runners Up – Tabitha Mazza and Zakk McDonald
Open (aged 19 and above)
- First Place – Rachel Burns
- Second Place – Cliff Forshaw
- Third Place – Marian Griffin
- Runners Up – Dean Gessie, Alex MacFarlane and Robert Seatter
Voice Competition
- First Place – Georgia Nicholson
Highly Commended
Senior
Alice Burton ‘A Poet’s Purpose’
Julia Dadson ‘Apotheosis of the Blind Singer’
Edwin Humphreys, ‘Tuya’s Lament’
Catherine Li ‘A Doorway Dilemma’
Radhika Madaan ‘Muted Song’
Onyinye Nwodoh, ‘Wake the Winged Sleeper‘, ‘Three Sides of the Story‘
Sofia Leticia Angeles Roncal ‘ Tri’
Lola Smith ‘Passing the Torch’
Grace Taylor, ‘The Gospel of Dionysus‘, ‘When Love Slept’
Open
Aleeza Ahmed ‘Familia Mea’
Megan Baffoe, ‘Hecate Trimorphos’
Jeff Buller ‘Meanwhile on the Apollo Belvedere’
Clara Bykvist ‘Hymn to Apollo’
Laura Celeste ‘The Solution’ and ‘Woman in Triplicate’
Eden Chicken ‘Temple of Fortuna Virilis’
Sarah-Clare Conlon, ‘Like Magic’
Jack Cooper ‘Capriccio at Sir John Soane’s Museum’
Paul Findlay ‘Apollo Loosed’
Matilda le Fleming ‘River’
Bradley French ‘Pharmakis’
Sam Garvan ‘Homer and the Martenitsa’
Claud Harris ‘Museum Conversations’
Lisa Mary Kelly ‘Breakfast Sentinels’
Sophie Lau ‘The Greyest Mourning’
Lakeisha Mashumba ‘Raised without Sight’
Karen Mason ‘Ephesian Artemis, dreaming’
Glyn Matthews ‘Time-Share’
Tom Morton ‘Small God’
Sasha Mostafa ‘The Apotheosis of Homer’
Arlene Roxanna Muzquiz ‘Sarchophagus of Seti I’
Erwin Arroyo Perez ‘Twelve Hours in the Duat’
Natalia Richter ‘Seti, Son of Sun’
Olivia Sandhu ‘Fisherboy’
Anna-Rose Shack ‘The Cast of the Apotheosis of Homer’
Milo Skinner ‘The Apotheosis of Homer’, ‘The Triple Hecate’
Thariny Suresh ‘Maiden, Mother, Crone’ as incidental music
Sarah Townsend, ‘Egyptian Blue Subconscious’
Sara Vernekar, ‘Growing Pains’
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