Poet's 'song of longing' for absent son wins £5,000 prize

A poem inspired by the writer's experience of missing her son after he moved from the UK to Australia has won this year's £5,000 National Poetry competition.

- Ella Creamer

Fiona Larkin's poem, Absence Has a Grammar, was picked from nearly 22,000 entries.

"It feels a bit like a lottery win, because the odds are so high," said Larkin. When she got the call with the news, she felt both a "sense of disbelief" and "weirdly buoyant - that floating sense of something happening".

When her son moved to Brisbane, Larkin was "really taken aback" by how much she missed him. "I rarely write about my children. I think they've maybe got one poem each now," she said.