The 2011 Cardiff International Poetry Competition is open and waiting for your entry. The first prize-winner will walk way with a cheque for £5,000 for just one poem. Further prizes available are £500 for second place, £250 for third plus five runners up will receive £50 each.
The competition is accessible to all; it doesn’t matter if you are an established poet or just dabble with verse now and then. All entries to the competition will be judged anonymously, so this is a great opportunity to have your poetry judged on its own merits.
The hard tasking of judging the 2011 competition is down to mutli award-winning poets Don Paterson and Philip Gross and filter judge Tiffany Atkinson. Don Paterson teaches poetry at the University of St Andrews and since 1996 has been poetry editor at Picador. He has won a number of awards for his poetry, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize on two occasions. Most recently his collection Rain (Faber and Faber, 2009; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) won the 2009 Forward Prize.
Philip Gross has published numerous collections of poetry, the latest of which, The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009), won the T S Eliot Prize. His collection I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon, 2009), with photographs by Simon Denison, was the English-language winner of Wales Book of the Year 2010.
If you think you have what it takes to delight the judges and get your hands on the top prize of £5,000, then send Academi your poems now. Just make sure your poem is no longer than 50 lines long, is unpublished, in English and is not a translation of another author’s work then send it, along with your entry form and payment, to Academi.
Please note the new closing date of Friday 25 March 2011.
Visit www.academi.org/cipc/ to download an entry form. To receive an entry form through the post send a stamped, self addressed envelope to: Academi, CIPC11 Entry Form, Mount Stuart House, Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff, Wales, CF10 5FQ.
For further details contact Academi: 029 2047 2266 / [email protected]
The Cardiff International Poetry Competition is administered by Academi with the financial support of Cardiff Council.