>>News! Debut poetry collection with Corsair (Little, Brown) forthcoming in Spring 2028.
Esther Lay is a poet, Anglican priest, and classical singer. She is a 2025 Forward Prize nominee for “The Performance”, which won the East Riding Festival of Words Poetry Competition in 2025, and she is the winner the 2024 Write By The Sea Poetry Prize. She placed second (jointly with herself, for two poems) in the 2025 Write Out Loud Poetry Competition, judged by Neil Astley, 4th and 6th in the 2024 Plaza Prizes and 3rd in Trio International 2024, and was highly commended for three poems in the 2026 Charles Causley Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (three times), the 2025 Plaza Prizes, the Four Faced Liar Poetry Prize, New Writers Poetry Competition, Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year, Ironbridge Poetry Competition (with three poems), and the Winchester Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the National Poetry Prize, the Fish Prize, and Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year.
She has recent work in The Waxed Lemon, Grain Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Rust & Moth, Alchemy Spoon, 14 Magazine, Passionfruit Review, Magma, and The Four Faced Liar, and forthcoming work in Poetry London. She runs monthly poetry workshops in Wootton by Woodstock, where she is the parish priest. Her debut collection will be published by Corsair (Little, Brown / Hachette) in Spring 2028.
Esther Lay was born in California, brought up in Beijing, Singapore, and Sydney, and claims a hometown in Olney, Illinois. She read philosophy and theology at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and trained as a classical singer at the Royal Academy of Music in London. After a distinguished ten-year career as a concert soloist specialising in baroque repertoire (under the name Esther Brazil), she trained for priesthood at Ripon College Cuddesdon, where she began writing poetry in 2020, and served her curacy at St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, from 2021-2024, where she was the first woman to hold the post. She is now Rector of Wootton, in West Oxfordshire, where she lives with her husband Ben, who is a serving officer in the Royal Navy, and their two small children.
Reviews
On the poems “Jidan” and “Witness”, awarded joint second in Write Out Loud 2025:
“The author of two very different poems turned out to be the same poet, Esther Lay. In ‘Jidan’, the mixed-race speaker recalls a cruel childhood nickname (Jidan, Chinese for chicken egg, ‘white on the outside, yellow on the inside’) and turns it on its head, the image becoming symbolic of someone who will always protest, who won’t conform, who is proud to be different, to be herself. Her other poem ‘Witness’ takes the first four words of WS Merwin’s four-line poem ‘Witness’ (I want to tell …’) – an imagined future memory of life after climate change recalling the world as it had been – and takes off into an evocation of another life-changing but now vanished time, that of a mother finding herself in another time zone, that of living a 24-hour day with newborn babies. Both poems are sensually rich, every phrase or image on heightened alert to the five senses: sight, smell, hearing/sound (echoes!), taste and touch.”
– Neil Astley, Bloodaxe Books
On “Self-Portrait as Water”, shortlisted in the Plaza Prizes 2025:
“The poem begins tongue-in-cheek, with a flicker of humor, but then finds its curiosity and wonder—water, and how it is immense and mysterious and yet able to be cupped in our hands. The poem rushes in and out of the language of sea and water, creating currents of awe through imagery. There are fathoms of self yet to be unlocked in the big waters of this poem.”
– Natalie Diaz
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Esther Lay 