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Far Horizons Award for Poetry

2026 Winner—Shashank Tripathi

The Malahat Review is pleased to announce the winner of this year's Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Shashank Tripathi has won $1,250 for his poem, “The Huddle Considers Its Visitors,” set for publication in our 2026 fall issue #236.

Shashank Tripathi

Here's what this year's judge, Kevin Irie, had to say:

All eleven shortlisted poems were impressive by their mastery and confidence in range and tone, written with verve and finesse. In the end, after multiple re-readings, I chose “The Huddle Considers Its Visitors.”
A dramatic monologue is performative, and one in the voice of wildlife even more so. How do we assume a consciousness which, no matter the craft or conviction, can only be a continuation of our own? What can we add to a poetic lineage that includes Hughes’ “Hawk Roosting” or Atwood’s “Songs of the Transformed?” And how do we do it in a penguin’s voice? “The Huddle Considers Its Visitors” answers these questions with subtlety and skill, drawing the reader in without drawing attention to its own literary constructs. Here, invasive human activity is observed by a presence that is less commanding than curious. Concepts of what makes a colony, a settlement, or an invader are countered by a measured attempt to understand. The poem’s tonal restraint and concise phrasing convey an undertone of moods from certainty to hesitancy (“They mark everything they carry. / Their names, we think.”) and lead us to insight, leaving us to decide. How can you hold others accountable for their actions, knowing you can’t escape Nature’s hold on your own? In the closing line, the “us” is not human but what enfolds us as such: how little we know, how much we assume, how limited we all are. Such a haunting and wondrous elegy.

Shashank Tripathi is a digital transformation consulting executive and teaches strategy at London Business School and INSEAD. Originally from Singapore, he has lived across cities and now divides his time between Toronto and New York, which is a lot of weather for one person. His poems pay attention to what attention changes: a word misbehaving, a bird with better timing than most people, a room mid-confession. He is interested in how wit can sit beside tenderness without making too much of itself, and how meaning keeps smuggling itself into plain sight. His poem "the ache before grammar" was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem in 2025.

An interview with Shashank Tripathi on his winning poem will appear in a fall issue of our Substack newsletter.

We would also like to congratulate those who were shortlisted:
Bradley Alvarez, "When Papa gets arrested"
M. H. Perry, "For My Brother, Who Was Raised by a German Shepherd"
Ploy Jarungpiterah, "MV Reel: Iconic '00s Girl Groups"
Emily Kedar, "Vanishing Point"
Lillian Liao, "The Mugged Tree"
Katie Marti, "Birds of Nova Scotia"
Kyle McKillop, "Choate"
Halle Ward-Grignon, "be beautiful, now"
Carolyn Nakagawa, "I write a poem"
Rachael Riley, "Sir Gawain grows his own armour and his own anxieties."

Thank you to judge Kevin Irie, to our volunteers, and to all who entered the contest!

The Malahat Review's Far Horizons Award for Poetry runs every even-numbered year, alternating with the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction which runs every odd-numbered year.