MODRON MAGAZINE CELEBRATES FORWARD PRIZE SHORTLIST FOR POEM BY WELSH POET ABEER AMEER

Wales-based literary magazine MODRON is proud to announce that poet Abeer Ameer has been shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for her devastating and moving poem ‘At Least’, published online in our pages — a work that confronts ongoing genocide in Palestine with clarity, empathy, and a refusal to look away.

Ameer’s poem begins with a phrase from the news that stopped her cold: “They died in their sleep.” It responds to the violence of airstrikes on a block of flats — and more broadly, to the ways in which the language of Western media chooses, again and again, to sanitize unspeakable violence. Fluent in the idioms of the photojournalists whose work she follows closely, Ameer uses poetry to document, to witness, and to grieve.

Founded by Kristian Evans and Zoë Brigley, along with team Taz Rahman, Siân Melangell Dafydd, and Glyn F. Edwards, MODRON was created to publish writing that embraces care, justice, and the necessity of transformation in a time of ecological emergency. MODRON is part of a global community demanding environmental justice. War is an environmental issue, and our editorial stance is clear: poetry must reckon with the world, even — or especially — when the truth is uncomfortable.

Born in the UK to Iraqi parents, Abeer Ameer’s first poetic success came in a primary school Eisteddfod. She later pursued a career in dentistry, specialising in care for patients with anxiety and special needs. After becoming unwell and forced into early retirement, she rediscovered poetry through mindfulness classes and began writing about Iraq, trauma, and exile — subjects long buried under personal and cultural grief.

“I often say I came to poetry through the back door,” Ameer says. “But once I started writing, I was hooked. Poetry helped me open up.”

Her first collection, Inhale/Exile (Seren, 2021), explores the Iraqi diaspora, family memory, and the politics of silence. Her current work — including the shortlisted poem — continues this trajectory of witness and resistance.

At MODRON, we are moved and honoured to see this poem recognized, and we believe that independent magazines like ours have a duty to platform such work. It’s worth recognizing in a time when funding for the Welsh publishing industry is being eroded that the work that matters most is often made on the margins. We do not currently have any funding, but we thank the Books Council of Wales because their New Audiences funding programme was what made it possible for this magazine to begin life a few years ago. However, New Audiences has recently been shut down, and it seems unlikely that it will begin again.

For interviews or press images, please contact: modronmagazine@gmail.com