Manchester Writing Competition: The Manchester Poetry Prize

Description

The Manchester Writing Competition offers the UK’s biggest literary awards for unpublished work, offered by the country’s most successful writing school. The Competition was established in 2008 by Carol Ann Duffy (UK Poet Laureate 2009-19) and has awarded more than £175,000 to writers. Each year two £10,000* prizes are awarded: the Manchester Poetry Prize for best portfolio of poems and the Manchester Fiction Prize for best short story. Designed to encourage and celebrate new writing across the globe, the competition is open internationally to new and established writers.

Entrants must submit a portfolio comprising a minimum of three and a maximum of five poems. There is no line limit – minimum or maximum – for each individual poem, but the overall maximum length of the poems combined must not exceed 120 lines. Titles, blank lines and page numbers are not included in the line count.

Poetry Prize Judges 2019‌

‌Adam O'Riordan

‌Adam O'Riordan is Academic Director of the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met and has chaired the Manchester Poetry Prize panel since 2012. In 2008, he became the Wordsworth Trust Centre for British Romanticism’s youngest ever poet-in-residence and his first collection, In the Flesh, won a 2011 Somerset Maugham Award. His debut collection of short stories The Burning Ground was published by Bloomsbury in the UK and W.W. Norton & Company in the USA, and his second collection of poems A Herring Famine published by Chatto, in 2017.