Martin Doyle | The Irish Times
Gustav Parker Hibbett has received the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize for their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press) at an award ceremony in Trinity College Dublin this evening, Thursday, May 8th.
This is the seventh year of the prize, which is awarded annually for an outstanding debut collection of poetry in the English language. Valued at €10,000, the prize is sponsored by the John Pollard Foundation and administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre in the School of English at Trinity.
Parker Hibbett is a poet and essayist. Raised in New Mexico, USA, they are currently based in Dublin where they are the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. They are also pursuing a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin.
Parker Hibbett said: “Since publishing High Jump as Icarus Story, there have been so many small ways, almost daily, that I’ve been disarmed or humbled or bowled over by other people’s care and generosity, by the time so many people have taken simply to sit with my writing. With this award, I’m bowled over in a really big way.
“This year’s other shortlisted collections, which create the context of what this award means, all share what is one of my favourite qualities in poetry: the ambition and ability to expand the boundaries of what language can do, what it can hold and remake and conjure. It has been an honour to be here next to them, just as it is a honour now to see my collection next to the impressive lineage of winning collections. I’m very aware that we can choose how we engage with art—what we bring with us when we meet it, how willing we are to take it on its own terms—and that each kindness my book receives is a choice.
“The whole team at Banshee—in particular Jessica Traynor, Eimear Ryan and Laura Cassidy—were the first to meet this book with kindness. They received it with exceptional care, and they joined, with enthusiasm, in the project of helping it grow. The support of my friends and family, particularly my partner Abbie, has been another great kindness that I wouldn’t be able to write without. Thank you, of course, massively, to the judging panel—Eoin McNamee, Una Mannion and Tom Walker—for coming to my book with such generosity, and thank you as well to Stephen Vernon, Provost Linda Doyle, and Trinity College Dublin at large for your belief and investment in poetry. What an incredible honour this is. I am endlessly grateful.”
Previous winners are Patrick James Errington, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Gail McConnell, Diane Louie, Isabel Galleymore, and Hannah Sullivan.
Prof Eoin McNamee, director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre, said: “Gustav Parker Hibbett’s debut is a collection of remarkable range and in their own words, unlikely magic, the poet as Icarus falling through selves or rising up to meet them. At once exalted and humble this is work of the highest order.”
High Jump as Icarus Story was also shortlisted for the 2024 TS Eliot Prize and the 2025 Farmgate Café National Poetry Award.
They were also recently a co-recipient of the Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award.
