We offer heartfelt congratulations to Lincoln undergraduate Austin Spendlowe (2022, English Language and Literature) for winning the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize 2025 for his poem 'Jongleurs’. Founded in 1806 as a memorial to Sir Roger Newdigate (1719–1806), the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize is awarded for the best composition in English verse not exceeding 300 lines in length. It is open to current matriculated undergraduate students of the University.

Austin follows in the footsteps of highly-distinguished past prize winners, including Robert Stephen Hawker, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Laurence Binyon, Oscar Wilde, John Buchan, John Addington Symonds, James Laver, Donald Hall, James Fenton, P. M. Hubbard, Alan Hollinghurst and Lavinia Singer. 

Austin, who will graduate in July, said: "The Newdigate is a joyful surprise and a real spur to keep at it. I owe a great deal to those at Lincoln, tutors and peers alike, who have taught me so much about poetry over the last three years - thank you all. If you get a chance to read it, drop me an email to let me know what you think.”

On the Faculty of English website, the judges are quoted as saying: "We are pleased to award this year’s Sir Roger Newdigate prize to “Jongleurs.” Although we admired both poems by Austin Spendlowe, “Jongleurs” especially answered the theme with its resonant echoes of Wallace Stevens,  its answering of the Nursery Rhyme, “Hey, Diddle Diddle,” and its otter slinking “sotto voce” into the stream, a “warped echo” in the rippling water, distorted as the back of a spoon. We admired the poem’s lean, muscular music (“coughs up tuppence,” “smoky bronchioles,” and especially “the river tinkling in receipt”) and its playful approach to language. Like the “jongleurs” of the title, the poem sings and entertains, juggling its many shiny images while carrying a catchy tune."

Jongleurs

I twig a calf in France’s saffron sky,
Who overleapt a heightening moon.

‘This is old song’ gongs an old magnifico
By a cool plane tree. He exacts an air

He’s cooked for years in smoky bronchioles,
Where a henge of stock-stone people lay,

And say so little of how they got there.
One coughs up tuppence for the fiddler’s palm,

He snaps a catgut string in shock and flees
To a bridge, armpits metres from the stream.

I saw him toss a sort-of silver piece,
And caught the river tinkling in receipt,

Before an otter—do you see it too?—
Slinks sotto voce away, a warped echo

In tail-interrupted blue, at work so
Awkwardly on the back of a spoon.