Priest-poet the Revd Esther Lay is celebrating being signed by the same literary agent who represents the Poet Laureate following an award-winning year.
Esther, who only began writing poems during lockdown, has received several accolades for her work, including a nomination for the 2025 Forward Prize for The Performance, which won the East Riding Festival of Words Poetry Competition in 2025. She is also the winner of the 2024 Kilmore Quay Write By The Sea Poetry Prize.
She said: “I had a baby and a three-year-old during lockdown and ministerial training, so poetry was initially a way of expressing and processing what I was experiencing and what I valued: parenthood, love, relationships, the landscape, the natural world, the challenges and joys of faith. It was a brilliant outlet through my training and into my curacy.
"I took my current job because it was a part-time role and I could spend more time with my children while my husband is deployed with the Royal Navy, but also to devote more time to my writing. The two vocations overlap: I often preach about poetry and the poetry of the Bible, and write poems about faith and prayer.”
Following a ten-year career as a classical singer specialising in baroque repertoire, Esther enrolled at Cuddesdon, near Oxford, for ordination training in 2019. She says the written word has always been important to her, and admits to having been a failed novelist in her 20s. But, while at Cuddesdon, she entered a creative writing competition organised by her fellow trainee, the Revd Sorrel Shamel-Wood as a lockdown distraction. She won the competition, which was decided by an external judge, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now serving as the Rector of Wootton, Glympton, and Kiddington, Esther finds her poetry and her faith are often intertwined. She describes an overlap between prayer and poetry, often setting out to write a poem about family life only to find God is woven into it, and vice versa.
She added: “Writing poems and having a prayerful life are both about a certain quality of attention: being attuned to the presence of God and the hints that God is around you; being constantly aware of his love and presence in creation, and listening for those quiet words or lines that suggest themselves in silence or on a walk.”
Esther said she finds inspiration often strikes when she’s busy doing mundane tasks like the laundry, and has found that poetry, like ministry, is partly about communication, but fundamentally about investigating what it means to be truly human.
She describes the process: “With that prayerful/poetic antennae up, my mind is buzzing, and I’m batting ideas away as I go about my day. If an idea comes back a second or a third time and keeps bothering me, then I know it’s time to sit down and write a poem. But a first draft is never the end - 95% of the work is in the editing.”
With representation by a literary agent, she is hoping to see publication of her completed first collection in the next year or two, but she has already begun work on her next project: a non-fiction work connecting the Christian liturgical year to art, music, and poetry. She offers free poetry workshops once a month in Wootton church, and selections of her published work can be found at estherlay.com.
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