CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS A reminder that our annual anthology, Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021, is still open to receive submissions UNTIL OCTOBER 31st. The judge is the highly-respected poet Nick Makoha, and the entry fee is currently FREE, to encourage the broadest and most diverse range of entries we can find.
The link to enter is on Submittable, with full information.
The selected poets are included in a paperback anthology with between 50 and 100 other poets, to be published no later than July 2021. This is the fourth year this contest has run; because of the 2020 pandemic, and the need to always encourage more communities, we have kept the book open and combined two years into one.
Please share this news with all poets you know, who live in the UK, GB or Ireland, and who have yet to have signed a contract for full collection. Anyone from 18 upwards may enter up to three poems for free; they may have been previously published but not online.
The Best New British and Irish Poets competition collects poems from the best new poets in the UK and Ireland. It is based on a similar and well-known US prize anthology. The top poems will be published in The Best New British and Irish Poets anthology in 2020/21, following the anthologies from 2016 to 2019. This year's anthology is guest-edited by Nick Makoha.
Nick Makoha’s debut collection Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and nominated by The Guardian as one of the best books of 2017. He is the 2019 Writer-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust and Wasafiri. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works Alumni. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and is the 2016 winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. He is a Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Goldsmiths. He is a Trustee for the Arvon Foundation and The Ministry of Stories and a member of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen collective. His play The Dark produced by Fuel theatre and directed by JMK award-winner Roy Alexander is on National Tour. www.nickmakoha.com
Eligibility: poets resident in the UK or Ireland, regardless of nationality, as well as passport holders from the UK or Ireland who live abroad, are eligible to submit work for consideration if they have not yet published (and are not under contract to publish at time of entry) a full-length collection of poetry. Poets who have published pamphlets are eligible to compete as are poets included in previous editions of the anthology.
Guidelines: submit one to three original poems in the English language for consideration. Poems may have appeared before in print periodicals, journals, or magazines, but not in online venues. Please include any prior publication information for each submitted poem in your cover letter. Your cover letter should also include a brief biographical note with your contact details. Do not include your name on your poems.
