Manchester Poetry Prize
The 2023 Manchester Writing Competition shortlists will be revealed in mid-November and the £10,000 Poetry and Fiction Prize winners announced on 8th December.
Competition details (open)
Manchester Poetry Prize: £10,000*
For: a portfolio of 3 to 5 poems with a combined maximum length of 120 lines
Entry fee: £18 (reduced price entry available)
Deadline for Entries: 5pm (UK time) on 1st September 2023
Chair of Judges: Malika Booker
The Manchester Poetry Prize asks for a portfolio of three to five poems with an overall combined length of up to 120 lines. Titles, blank lines and page numbers are not included in the line count. Quotations, dedications and epigraphs should be included. Poems submitted should be new work, not previously published elsewhere. The Prize is open internationally to those aged 16 or over.
Reduced Price Entry
100 reduced price (£10) entries are available to entrants who might not otherwise be able to take part in the Competition. If you would like to apply for one of these, please contact the Manchester Writing School on writingschool@mmu.ac.uk by 30th June 2023 to register your interest. Please see the terms and conditions of entry for further details/eligibility criteria.
Chair of Judges
Malika Booker is an award-winning poet, theatre-maker and multi-disciplinary artist, and an experienced writing competition judge. She is the founder of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen writers’ community initiative. In 2019 she was commissioned to write and perform a poem about Mars for a BBC Science series about the solar system and was awarded a prestigious Society of Authors Cholmondley Award for her contribution to poetry. She joined Manchester Metropolitan University as Lecturer in Creative Writing in January 2019.
Malika Booker
Judges
Momtaza Mehri is a poet and independent researcher working across criticism, translation, anti-disciplinary research practices, education, and radio. She is a former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University (Los Angeles). A former Columnist-in-Residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space, she has also completed residencies at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the British Library. She won Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manchester Poetry Prize in 2019.
Momtaza Mehri
Clare Shaw (they/them) has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. Their latest collection Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) is a poetic interrogation of love, absence and bereavement: it attracted a Northern Writer’s Award, and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year. Clare lectures at the University of Huddersfield, and is a regular tutor for Wordsworth Grasmere, the Royal Literary Fund and the Arvon Foundation. With a background in mental health and education, Clare is a keen advocate for writing as a tool of social and personal change.
Clare Shaw
Queries and Contact
Queries should be sent in writing to the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met: writingschool@mmu.ac.uk. Please consult our Frequently Asked Questions page before getting in touch.