The 2024 National Poetry Competition is calling on both emerging and well established poets to submit their previously unpublished work for its open call. 

This year’s contest will have the following judges: 

• John McAuliffe’s new book National Theatre (Gallery) will be out in Winter 2024.  His other books include a Selected Poems (Gallery, 2021),The Kabul Olympics (Gaĺlery, 2020) and versions of Bosnian poet Igor Klikovac, Stockholm Syndrome (Smith Doorstop, 2018). He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester, where he teaches at the Centre for New Writing, and Associate Publisher at Carcanet Press.
• Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet, essayist, and editor. She was born and bred in Lipa, Philippines. She was 16 years old when her mother – a nurse in the NHS – brought the family to the UK. Her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto, 2020), was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is the co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language. She was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2021-2022, sits on the editorial board for Poetry London magazine, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  Her new collection AGIMAT is forthcoming in September 2024 with Chatto.
• Stephen Sexton’s first book, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.

 This Competition offers to its winners a first prize of £5,000, a second prize of £2,000, a third prize of £1,000 and commendations of £500 each. The winning entries will be published in The Poetry Society’s journal, The Poetry Review.

Deadline: 31st October, 2024.

For further enquiry, please visit: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/