Sarah Maguire Prize 2026

Chair of the Judges

Mona Kareem is the author of four poetry collections. Her work has been translated into nine languages, including the bilingual Arabic-English selection I Will Not Fold These Maps (Poetry Translation Centre, London 2023). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nickle Copper, Poetry Northwest, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Ra’ad Abdul Qadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread, and Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within.

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet born in Argentina who lives and works in the UK. His debut English collection Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix second English collection, Southernmost: Sonnets is forthcoming with Chatto & Windus (Penguin Random House) in June 2025. He is the editor of Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry, published by 14 Poems. Boix has been included in many anthologies, such as the Forward book of poetry, Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2020 (BlackSpring Press), Islands Are But Mountains: Contemporary Poetry from Great Britain (Platypus Press), 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren Books), 100 Queer Poems (Vintage/Penguin), Até Mais/Until More: An Anthology of Latinx Futurisms, (Deep Vellum), Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye), and Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (Bloodaxe), among others. His poems have appeared in many national and international journals, including POETRY, PN Review, and The Poetry Review. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works program, co-director of Un Nuevo Sol, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture new voices of Latinx writers in the UK, and a board member of Magma Poetry. He received the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award, the Keats-Shelley Prize, a PEN Award, and The Society of Authors’ Foundation and K. Blundell Trust, among other accolades.

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He also co-edited Mick Imlah: Selected Prose (Peter Lang, 2015) and The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB Editions, 2013). He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His writing appears regularly in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler and Poetry (Chicago), among others. He is an Assistant Professor of English, French and Italian at the University of California, Davis.