Deadline: October 15, 2023
Entry fee: £3
About the competition
Welcome to The Prose Poem, a new prose poetry project.
To launch our project, we are holding an inaugural prose poetry competition for prose poems of up to 500 words on any subject. We are currently open to submissions until 15 October 2023 (23:59 GMT).
Prizes are:
- First place: £100 plus publication
- Second place: £50 plus publication
- Third place: £25 plus publication
- Honorable mention: £10 plus publication
We offer publication to all shortlisted poems; all submissions will be considered for publication unless you let us know in your cover letter that you only wish to be published should your poem place or receive an honorable mention.
Unlike many competitions, we will be reading throughout the submission period, so you may receive a notification that you are on the shortlist or that your poem is no longer being considered before the submission period is over. We will not announce prize winners and honourable mentions until after the competition closing date, at which time our adjudicator will select the winning poems.
Competition guideline
- You may submit as many times as you like, with a maximum of three poems per submission.
- We prefer .doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf, and .txt documents. If your piece relies heavily on formatting, please send us a pdf. (We will request another format if the poem is accepted for publication.)
- Please submit your work via our submission engine, Duosuma. Select the call for one, two, or three pieces at https://duotrope.com/duosuma/submit/the-prose-poem-contest-aH49j depending on how many you wish to send. Please make sure to choose the call with the number of entries you wish to submit so that you are charged the correct amount. If you send three entries to the one-poem call, we will only read the first poem in the submission.
- You do not need a paid subscription to Duosuma/Duotrope to enter, but you will need to make a free account if you don’t have one already.
- You can find an online guide to using Duosuma here, and their customer support webform can be found here.
- If you unable to use Duosuma, you may make a payment via PayPal at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/theprosepoem as an alternative. Please contact us for instructions.
- If you are taking advantage of our free entry scheme for underrepresented or low-income writers, please email us for instructions on how to submit. You do not need to give details of why you are eligible.
- Read the whole guideline and enter the competition here.
