Congratulations to Newcastle poet Daniel Hinds, who recently won a prestigious international poetry prize, the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Award.
Daniel Hinds's poetry collection New Famous Phrases, published by Broken Sleep Books, won the international UNESCO Bridges of Struga Award 2026 from Struga Poetry Evenings. The collection was also recently a finalist for another international award, the Big Other Book Award for Poetry 2025, and received an Honourable Mention in the Big Other Readers’ Choice Award 2025.
For the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Award, Daniel was awarded 1000 Euros, a statuette, and his poetry collection has been translated into Macedonian by Gorjan Kostovski. He also participated in events at the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival, including televised readings on Macedonian national television, sharing a stage with the President of Macedonia, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, an interview and reading in Europe House, and a reading outside the historic St. Mary Peribleptos church in Ohrid.
This is only the second time an English poet has won the award, which is bestowed upon the best debut poetry collection internationally. Other writers at the festival, which featured poets from across five continents, included Peter Mackay the Makar (National Poet of Scotland), Ella Frears, Xi Chuan, and Michael Krüger. Previous participants of the festival include Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, and Allen Ginsberg.
Daniel Hinds’s debut poetry collection New Famous Phrases was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2025. He is a North East Culture Award Newcomer of the Year finalist, a BBC New Creative, Ilkley Literature Festival New Northern Poet, and New Writing North North East Poet. He won the Poetry Society’s Timothy Corsellis Young Critics Prize. His poetry was commended in the National Centre for Writing’s UEA New Forms Award and has been published in The London Magazine, The New European, Wild Court, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, Southword, Shearsman, and elsewhere, and broadcast on BBC platforms. Daniel’s stage adaptation of his BBC audio piece, The Stone Men of Newcastle, was a Runner-Up for the Pomegranate Poetry Theatre Prize, and was performed by Théâtre Volière at the Poetry Plays Festival at the Cockpit Theatre, London.