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Wales Book of the Year Shortlist 2025: Little Universe


We're absolutely delighted for Natalie Ann Holborow, today shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2025 for her third poetry collection, the stellar Little Universe.

Thanks to all the judges and huge congratulations to all the other wonderful writers on the shortlist!



‘Poems of true wonder, mystery composed with precision. Natalie Ann Holborow is a custodian of beauty in the ordinary and the fragility of experience. The lyric moments of her Little Universe made me lift my eyes from the page and consult the stars.’ – Oliver James Lomax
'Little Universe presents an intense voyage through a recognisable Welsh landscape of family, hospital wards, homes, beaches, love, and new life. The poems encompass mythology, the joys of the everyday and the personal inevitability of illness and grief. This is a poetry acutely aware of the specificity of vocabulary and of the unconstrained possibilities of inventive language. I love, love, love this collection and every part of its heartfelt oomph!’ – Jeremy Dixon
‘Natalie Ann Holborow’s new collection probes vulnerability with a fresh eye. The investigations of its visceral poems discover the mind and body’s ‘clandestine angles’ that emerge only at their limits, when they are ‘primed for the blow’. This is intimate, poignant writing. Stunning imagery bursts from these pages as the speaker’s selves open to their surroundings, the reader joining a chorus of "startled applause".’ – John McCullough
'Vivid, sometimes lurid; taut, at times with a tightness that speaks of intense situations, mindstates, emotions; and, very often, visual, these are poems which manage a balance between being scalpel-sharp yet rich in description... I know of very few young writers who are quite so fantastic... It’s a book that will mesmerise from beginning to end, and holds great power.' – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine



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