What happens when a collection of paintings becomes an invitation to write?
Earlier this year, Borough Road Gallery partnered with The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network and poet and visual artist Sophie Herxheimer to launch The Colour Challenge, inviting young writers to respond to colour through poetry. Inspired by A David Bomberg Legacy: The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University, the challenge encouraged participants to look closely at the world around them, to consider colour not simply as description but as sensation, memory, atmosphere and emotion.
The response exceeded all expectations.
We received 762 poems from 492 young poets, with entries arriving from across the UK and around the world. Young writers submitted work from more than 50 countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Ukraine, the United States and Zimbabwe.
The challenge drew inspiration from the artists represented in the Sarah Rose Collection, particularly David Bomberg's belief in the "spirit in the mass" — a commitment to direct observation, sensory experience and creative integrity. Participants were invited to explore colour through close looking, ekphrastic writing, and reflections on their own creative processes.
The resulting poems demonstrated remarkable originality and range. Some transformed colour into intimate meditations on family relationships; others used vivid palettes to explore memory, migration, landscape and identity. Across the entries, colour became a way of understanding the world anew.
The winning poems responded to six artworks from the collection:
The Cochineal Blonde Prize — Peroxide (My Mother's Heart) by Zelda Cahill-Patten
The Purple Waltz Prize — Purple Flowers by Nisha Patel
The Scarlet Tree Prize — Burning Branches by Mya Shafi
The Copper Antenna Prize — Diary of a Peacock Butterfly by Andrea Domingo
The Fluorescent Blue Prize — I've been thinking about how I used to swim at night by Alyna Shae Lim
The Orange Paper Prize — The Way Light Passes Through by Lauren Chung
Together, these poems reveal the continuing vitality of the collection and the many ways contemporary audiences can engage with art. They show that the works in the Sarah Rose Collection are not fixed historical objects but living prompts for imagination, reflection and creative exchange.
We are enormously grateful to The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network and Sophie Herxheimer for their collaboration, and to every young poet who shared their work with us. The extraordinary number of submissions reminds us that colour remains one of the most immediate and universal ways we experience the world—and that poetry continues to offer powerful new ways of seeing.
ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk
