CO WINNER OF THE LEWIS EDWARDS MEMORIAL PRIZE 2026
Maya Le Her is a student and emerging writer based in Edinburgh. In 2022, one of her poems was published in Arlo’s Art Therapy Journal, a journal by Arlo Parks in support of CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) and she was a Youth Curator and Moderator for the Sydney Writers’ Festival. In 2024, she won the Senior Original category of the Classical Association Poetry Competition and was commended as a Foyle Young Poet by the Poetry Society. In 2025, Maya’s poem ‘Photograph’ was published in Light and Shadow.
Instagram: @mjleher
“As a young writer and student of the University, it is an unexpected honour to co-win the Lewis Edwards Memorial Prize for my poem ‘Feeling Blue’. On a personal level, I’m deeply touched by this recognition of my strange, long poem and appreciative of the prize’s generous compensation, which will allow me more time to write.”
Feeling Blue
i.
I have fallen into a silent film,
A dream with walls of blue cerulean.
And someone once commissioned you
To paint the portrait of a pornstar
Fucked more times than she could count –
actually, it was 1,057 times in twelve hours –
As some sort of social critique, but the idea
Never even touched the sides of your mind.
Perhaps you never knew the disconnection
Of a desire beyond desire, of the need to split
Intimacies between separate bodies, to kiss
One set of lips while thinking of another’s smile.
ii.
I wonder if the same division is true for men,
If the one thousand and fifty-seven
Lie back and think of other English girls
When they feel Blue in bed, if her body
Displaces the longing for another’s touch,
Or if this is the pinnacle of male fantasy —
Lips, tits, a few minutes — half-blissful,
Half-brutal; the hyper-physical education
Of boys so young they wet the bed with fear
Eight years before, watched porn on their
Phones in primary school, and never knew
The monster under the bed was loneliness
