Fitzcarraldo Editions and Mahler & LeWitt Studios are thrilled to announce the inaugural awardee of the Sacha Verna Poetry Residency is Daisy Lafarge.

The Sacha Verna Poetry Residency offers a fully-funded, four week development residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, for a poet publishing with Fitzcarraldo Editions . Poets are decided by the publisher and & Mahler & LeWitt Studios. The residency is organised in memory of the Swiss cultural journalist, Sacha Verna, and supported by Carol LeWitt.

Daisy Lafarge was born in Hastings and has lived in Scotland since 2011. She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021), which won a Betty Trask Award, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. Lovebug, a book on the poetics of infection, was published by Peninsula in 2023. Her writing has been widely published, appearing in Granta, frieze, the Financial Times, Art Review, TANK, The White Review, and elsewhere. She received a PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2021 and is the 2026 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. Her second novel, ASTRALABE, is forthcoming from Faber in 2027. Her next collection of poetry will be publishing with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

With a donation from the T.S. Eliot Foundation, the Fitzcarraldo Editions poetry list was launched in 2025.

The residency builds on a longstanding collaboration between Fitzcarraldo Editions and Mahler & LeWitt Studios who, since 2016, have organised the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize.

daisylafarge.com