Carers UK held a 2025 Poetry Competition to mark the charity’s 60th anniversary, in which carers and writers were invited to respond to the competition’s theme of ‘Caring, family and community’.
I was deeply touched to have a poem shortlisted in the competition, judged by poet and author Cheryl Moskowitz, not least because this was the first poem I’d written after a long hiatus from creative work while caring for my father through disability and dementia.
During our lifetimes, two in three of us will become unpaid carers, and each of the poems in the competition anthology, published this month, present “a uniquely powerful perspective on the caring experience, in surprising and unexpected ways”.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the celebration event at London’s National Poetry Library, but was delighted and moved to receive two copies of the anthology Caring, Family and Community, which includes my poem ‘Going Outside’.
You can read more about the competition, and the winning poems, at www.carersuk.org/get-involved/join-us/poetry-competition/2025
Shauna Darling Robertson 