Award-winning poet Philip Gross will judge this year’s Ledbury Poetry Competition.
The annual competition opened for entries on Monday (May 15) and remains open until July 10.
Gross has published 27 collections, for adults and for young people, over 40 years.
He won the T.S. Eliot in 2009, a Cholmondeley Award in 2017, and is a keen collaborator, having worked with Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (Mulfran, 2018), with scientists on the young people’s collection Dark Sky Park (Otter-Barry, 2018) and with artist Valerie Coffin Price and Welsh-language poet Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (Seren, 2021).
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His latest, The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022), a PBS Recommendation, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.
He said: “What I’ll be looking for…? Poems that aren’t whatever I might think I’m looking for.
“Poems intent on being wholly, intensely themselves, regardless of what a judge, the zeitgeist or even their author might want them to be.
“Poems that have to be poems because they couldn’t be expressed in any other way.”
Festival director Chloe Garner added: “Ledbury Poetry Competition has pushed many poets onwards, towards more poems, a collection and beyond. So enter now and give your work a chance.”
The first prize for the competition is £1,000 cash and, as part of an on-going partnership with Arvon, a week’s poetry course.
Second Prize is £500 and third prize is £250. All winners are invited to read at Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2024.
Arvon is a leading creative writing charity with a wide range of residential and online writing courses.
The winner will have one calendar year from the prize being announced to claim either a residential or online week of their choice. The competition is international, open to poets writing in the English language.
Mary Morris, artistic director at Arvon: “Ledbury Poetry has an impressive track record when it comes to recognising fresh talent, and so Arvon is delighted to be working in partnership with this competition to help develop and nurture that talent, whether in one of our writing houses or online through Arvon at Home.”
You must be 18 years of age or over to enter. All terms and conditions and details of how to enter can be found online https://ledburypoetry.org.uk/home/ledbury-poetry-competition-2023/
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