Deadline: August 31, 2022
Entry fee: £5
About the competition
The competition is open to both new and established poets aged 18 and over from across the globe and has two categories:
- Open category (open to all poets aged 18 years and over)
- English as an Additional Language (EAL) category (open to all poets aged 18 and over who write in English as an Additional Language.
We are excited to say that this year’s judge is the award-winning poet Caroline Bird.
Caroline is a poet and playwright. She has published seven books of poetry with Carcanet, most recently Rookie: Selected Poems (2022). The Air Year, published in 2020, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, was shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and was a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review.
Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. Caroline was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.
Competition guidelines
The competition deadline is 11 pm BST on Wednesday 31 August 2022.
The first three poems submitted cost £5 per poem. Subsequent entries in the same submission cost £4 per poem. Entrants may submit a maximum of ten poems, following the instructions in the Oxford Brookes Shop. All entries must be unpublished work. Please read the full competition terms and conditions before entering. They are available below.
There are two steps to entering the competition:
- Please visit the Brookes Shop and click on ‘Book Event’, selecting the number of poems you wish to enter. Then you can register as a new customer and pay for your entry/entries.
- Once you have paid, please e-mail your unnamed poems in doc/docx/pdf format to [email protected]
- Enter the competition here.
Please mark your entry Open or EAL in the top right-hand corner of your document.
You will receive an automatic e-mail in response, confirming that we have received your poem/s. Please note that there is no entry form for this competition. The Poetry Centre will match the details you submit via the Shop with your e-mailed poems.
If you have questions about the competition, please consult our Frequently Asked Questions (below). If your question isn’t answered there, contact us at: [email protected]
You can find out about last year’s competition and the winning poems of 2021