Tag Archives: writing contests

Enter Winchester Poetry Prize 2024

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Sunshine snail cr Judy Darley

Winchester Poetry Prize 2024 invites you to submit poetry “with a good emotional thwack.” The closing date for entries is 31st July 2024.

Entries cost £6 for first poem, £5 for subsequent poems.

A ‘Pay it Forward’ scheme introduced by 2020’s competition winner, Lewis Buxton, allows you to pay for an extra entry that will fund a submission by a poet who wouldn’t otherwise be able to enter the competition.

The judge is Clare Shaw, whose fourth poetry collection Towards a General Theory of Love (Bloodaxe, 2022) won a Northern Writers Award and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year. Clare teaches creative writing at the University of Huddersfield, and is a regular tutor at Wordsworth Grasmere, the Royal Literary Fund and the Arvon Foundation.

“Whatever the subject, fill your poetry with curiosity, and an excitement for language. Tone, language, form – all of these tools bring the poem to life in the imagination, intellect and heart of the reader. Send me your living, breathing poems!”

Winchester Poetry Prizes

  • 1st prize = £1000

  • 2nd prize = £500

  • 3rd prize = £250

Winning and commended poems will be published in a competition anthology.

The Kathryn Bevis Prize will be awarded for the best poem written by a Hampshire-based poet. 

The winner of the Kathryn Bevis Prize will receive £150, will read their poem as part of a special prize-giving event at Winchester Poetry Day 2024, and will feature in a printed anthology made available on the day. In addition, The Writing School will offer the winner of the Kathryn Bevis Prize three one-day poetry workshops with leading poets, as well as a five-day Digital Poetry Retreat with Costa Prize Winner Jonathan Edwards.

This prize is designed to offer a year of development opportunities and coaching to help the winner of the Kathryn Bevis Prize to develop their poetic career, in honour of Kathryn who has supported many new writers to develop their own talent.

Flamingo, Kathryn’s debut pamphlet published by Seren, was named as one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Books of the Year’ for 2022 and shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet, 2022. ‘My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written – 2023.

Her debut collection The Butterfly House was published by Seven in March 2024.

Find full details of the competition here: www.winchesterpoetryfestival.org/prize.

Got an event, challenge, competition, creative opportunity or call for submissions you’d like to draw attention to? Send me an email at JudyDarley (@) ICloud (dot) com.

Enter The Masters Review chapbook contest

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Arnos Vale in the morning frost_by Judy Darley
The Masters Review is inviting submissions to their chapbook contest for emerging writers.

The deadline for entries is 17th December 2023 at midnight PT.

The winning writer will receive $3,000, digital and print manuscript publication, and 75 contributor copies.

Michael Martone, author of almost 30 books and chapbooks, will choose this year’s winner.

Michael  says: “I have always loved chapbooks. The first two books I published were chapbooks. What excites me is when a chapbook takes itself seriously as a literary form –up to something unique and different from other ‘packaging,’ other narrative or lyrical delivery devices — the novel, the short story collection, the novella, etc. (…) I love when a chapbook presents itself on an equal footing as those other forms. Not lesser or better but different, special. Its content is unable to be expressed in any other manner but this compact, shaped-charge of a book.”

Last year’s winner, Coats by Naomi Telushkin, selected by Kim Fu, will be published next spring.

The Masters Review say: “We’re interested in collections of flash fiction, creative nonfiction essays, short stories, and anything in-between. We encourage you to be bold, to experiment with style and form, as long as you stay under 45 pages.”

Find full details here: mastersreview.com/chapbook-contest/ 

Got an event, challenge, competition, new venture or call for submissions you’d like to draw my attention to? Send me an email at judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.