Culture | Posted on November 28th, 2025 | return to news

Weymouth musician wins Yeovil Literary Prize for Poetry

Retired teacher and musician Andrew Mark Duxbury’s poem was chosen out of around 246 other entries for the prize.

A retired teacher and local musician is celebrating after winning an international poetry competition.

Born in Weymouth and living in Portland, Andrew Mark Duxbury found out in October that he had won the Yeovil Literary Prize for Poetry 2025 for his poem ‘Where the River Un-writes Its Name’.

Set up in 2002 by the Yeovil Community Arts Association, the Literary Prize aims to promote creative writing and support aspiring writers around the world. There are five categories (novel, short story, poetry, children’s and young adult novel, and writing without restrictions) and the winners each receive cash prizes.

Duxbury, who can often be seen busking on Weymouth Quayside, won £625 for his submission, which was chosen out of nearly 250 entries. He said: “I had binned my entry, but rescued it and it reads much better now I know it was a success against 246 other entries from all over the world.

“Before winning this prize, my only recognised achievement as an adult was a silver medal in a parent’s swimming race at a local gala.”

Duxbury added that he had been entering the competition for years. He read out the poem at the award ceremony during the Yeovil Literary Festival held from 17–27 October.

“In 25 years of the millennium, I have written some 250,000 words. It is gratifying that 250-ish of these have been accepted finally by independent scrutineers to be in something approaching an appropriate order for others to read!”

He plans to carry on writing and creating, and has recently had two pieces of prose included in the Weymouth Climate Hub Anthology.

To see some of Duxbury’s musical work, check out his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@andrewduxbury5678.

Where the River Un-writes Its Name

By Andrew Mark Duxbury

The river was never a river,
Only a mouthful of syllables,
A language of longing trickled over stones.
It remembers nothing of itself; No name, no map,
Only the slow forgetting of its banks.
Somewhere, a boy presses his ear
To the belly of the water,
Listens for the pulse of something older than any sound.
Somewhere, a woman buries her hands in silt,
Pulling out a coin the colour of shale
We all wade through histories
We do not know how to carry.
The wind unfurls the reeds.
The reeds unspool the current.
The current unknots the years.
And here, at the place where experience
Folds itself into mist,
I leave my name
To drift downstream with drowned things,
Slipping between reeds and vanishing,
Weightless, unfinished, and free.