Disgraced ex-BBC presenter Huw Edwards complained that he is a “loser” in his latest Substack newsletter after failing to place in a prestigious poetry competition. The convicted sex offender, 64, admitted accessing 41 child sexual abuse images in 2024, including seven of the most serious type, and was given a six-month sentence suspended for two years.
Poem Entry and Contest Results
Despite his conviction, Edwards entered a poem about his late father into the Welsh poetry contest National Eisteddfod Crown Competition. In his latest email to subscribers, he explained that he placed in the third and lowest category, “usually reserved for entries better suited to a permanent place in the drafts folder”.
Poems are entered under a pseudonym, so organisers wouldn’t have known which was Edwards’.
Edwards' Reaction
He said: “My prospects of winning — this was, after all, my very first poem — were nonexistent. Creating a work worthy of the Eisteddfod Crown requires poetic skill of the highest degree.
“The adjudicators divided the entrants into three classes. The third is the equivalent of Trump’s ‘Loser’ category.
“This was the category into which I was pointedly placed by the eminent adjudicators. I owe them my thanks. In a period of unrelenting personal darkness, the force of their slapdown induced me to open an excellent bottle of wine in mock celebration.
“A far more genuine celebration of my failure will have taken place in the fetid atmosphere of the festival grandees’ trailer park.”
Addressing His Conviction
The poem took Edwards a year to “write, rewrite, adjust, modify and finesse”. In the same newsletter, Edwards reiterated again that he had “accepted responsibility” for his past actions, and said “the global trade in this appalling [child abuse] material must be destroyed.
“Only then can we save children from the evil exploitation which drives that trade.”
He said that the grief of losing his father and his own “extreme illness” led to him “opening files sent to me which contained indecent images of children”. He insisted: “No, it was not clear to me what the files contained.
“Yes, I deleted them as soon as I realised what they were. And there were no such images found in my possession. Despite all that — a series of potential mitigating factors — I still have to take responsibility for what I did.”
