Theresa Lola’s poetry collection was declared the winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025 on Tuesday, October 28, 2025.
The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is awarded by Arrowsmith Press, in conjunction with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and The Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. It is awarded to a full-length book of poems by a living poet who is not a US citizen, published in the previous calendar year. It is named after the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature winner and Saint Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott, and is worth $2,000. The prize money is shared by the poet and the translator, where translations apply. Canisia Lubrin won it in 2021, while Saddiq Dzukogi got the nod in 2022. In recent years, Tawanda Mulalu and Romeo Oriogun have been shortlisted.
This year’s Walcott Prize judge is Ishion Hutchinson, the author of three poetry collections, School of Instructions: a Poem, House of Lords and Commons, and Far District, and the book of essays, Fugitive Tilts. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. They revealed the finalists on Monday, July 28, before the winner’s collection Ceremony for The Nameless, written by Theresa Lola and published by Penguin Press, was announced on Tuesday, October 28, 2025.
Ceremony for the Nameless comesU+0020with the following blurb;
In Yoruba culture, newborn babies are welcomed into the world, and ushered into the social fabric, through naming ceremonies filled with songs of praise. The names bestowed are communicative both of where the baby has come from – the circumstances of its birth, the atmosphere in the home – and of where its future will take it. Both are forms of destiny.
Far-reaching and musical, Theresa Lola’s second collection explores the act of naming and its role in shaping our identities, our aspirations, what we carry and how we belong. Lola conjures and questions the realities of her dual Nigerian-British identity; traces the lineages of names; asks why some deserve to be named while others are treated as though invisible; and explores the ways our journey through life might require us to cast off old expectations – both others’ and our own – just as at other times it can bring us back, strangely and unexpectedly, to where we first began.
Theresa Lola will split the $2,000 cash prize with joint winner Mary O’Malley.
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