The awards aim to promote the pamphlet form and to enable poets and publishers to develop and continue creating.
Additional awards have included the "Poetry Pamphlet in a Celtic Language" and, as of 2022, the Environmental Poet of the Year prize.
The awards were founded in 2009 by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in a collaboration with the British Library that continues to this day.
[2] The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney praised the prize's establishment: These inspired awards recognise that the pamphlet has a fundamental importance in literary culture far exceeding anything suggested by the dictionary – "a brief publication, generally having a paper cover".
[21] This was inaugurated 2022-23 and recognises an outstanding UK poetry in pamphlet form about climate change, its effects and what to do about it.