Call for Submissions:2014 Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Closing Date: Friday 14th March 2014

The 2014 Cardiff International Poetry Competition is now open for entries. The competition offers one of the largest monetary prizes for a poetry competition of its kind. First prize is £5,000. Additional prizes are £500 for second place, £250 for third and five runners-up receive £50 each. 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 task of judging the 2014 competition will be down to award-winning poets Lemn Sissay, Rhian Edwards and filter judge Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Click here to read more about the judges.

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 your poems now. Just make sure your poem is no longer than 50 lines long, is unpublished, is in English, and is not a translation of another author’s work. Send it, along with your entry form and payment, to Literature Wales.

To enter 

• Entry fee: £7.00 per poem. 

• To download an entry form, click here.

• To receive an entry form through the post send a stamped, self addressed envelope to: Literature Wales, CIPC14 Entry Form, Cambrian Buildings, Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff, Wales, CF10 5FL.

2014 Cardiff International Poetry Competition Open for Entries

The 2014 Cardiff International Poetry Competition is now open for entries. The competition offers one of the largest monetary prizes for a poetry competition of its kind. First prize is £5,000. Additional prizes are £500 for second place, £250 for third and five runners-up receive £50 each. 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 task of judging the 2014 competition will be down to award winning poets Lemn Sissay, Rhian Edwards and filter judge Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Click here to read more about the judges.

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 us your poems now. Just make sure your poem is no longer than 50 lines long, is unpublished, is in English and is not a translation of another author’s work. Send it, along with your entry form and payment, to Literature Wales

.

Entry fee: £7.00 per poem. 

To download an entry form, click here.

To receive an entry form through the post send a stamped, self addressed envelope to:
Literature Wales, CIPC14 Entry Form,
Cambrian Buildings, Mount Stuart Square,
Cardiff, Wales, CF10 5FL.

For further details contact Literature Wales:
029 2047 2266 / post@literaturewales.org

Closing date: Friday 14 March 2014

Mark Tredinnick, Australian Poet and Winner of Cardiff International Poetry Competition 2012 on a Tour of Wales

New Welsh Review is thrilled to announce that acclaimed Australian poet Mark Tredinnick will be visiting Wales this March in a celebratory tour organised by the literary magazine. His poem ‘Margaret River Sestets’, published in NWR 97, won the 2012 Cardiff International Poetry Competition, with a hefty £5,000 prize attached. Tredinnick has published eleven acclaimed works of poetry and prose, including his first lauded collection, Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, 2010) and is regularly invited to read his work worldwide.
The tour dates are:

Monday 18th March | 19.00 – 21.00 | Free
The Ends of the Earth, The Atrium, Glamorgan University, Adam Street, Cardiff
Reading alongside poet and critic Jeremy Hooker
For more information contact: pgross@glam.ac.uk
Tuesday 19th March | 18.30 – 20.00 | Free
Aberystwyth University, Arts Centre Bookshop, Aberystwyth
Chaired by poet and novelist Katherine Stansfield
For more information contact: acbstaff@aber.ac.uk
Monday 25th March | 19.30-22.00 | £3.00
Poems and Pints, Queen’s Hotel, Carmarthen
Includes an open-mic
For more information contact: anthony@write4word.org or (07772) 649316
Thursday 28th March | 19.30-21.30 | £4.00 / Conc.
Poets at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Somerset Place, Swansea
Includes an open-mic
For more information contact: (01792) 463980 or www.dylanthomas.com
Tuesday 26th March | 16.15-18.15 | £2.00 / £1.00
The Writers’ World, The Quad, University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, Carmarthen Campus
For more information contact: ros.hudis@googlemail.com or m.elfyn@tsd.ac.uk
Friday 29th March | 19.30 - 00.00 | £3.00
Cellar Bards, Cellar Bar, Cardigan
Includes an open-mic
For more information contact: charlotteep2001@yahoo.co.uk / (07971) 660025 

Read our exclusive interview with Mark Tredinnick here.

2013 Cardiff International Poetry Competition Closing Date: Friday 15th February 2013

The closing date for the 2013 Cardiff International Poetry Competition is almost upon us! But don't fret if you haven't entered yet, there is still just enough time to send us your winning entry. The first prize-winner will walk away 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 2013 competition will be down to none other than former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, and filter judge Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. For more information on the judges click here.

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 Literature Wales 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. Send it, along with your entry form and payment, to Literature Wales.

The closing date is Friday 15th February 2013

To download an entry form, visit: www.literaturewales.org/cipc/

Check out our interview with last year's winner here: http://bookapoet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/exclusive-interview-with-mark.html

Source: Literature Wales

Open: 2013 Cardiff International Poetry Competition - First Prize: £5,000

Literature Wales is delighted to announce that the 2013 Cardiff International Poetry Competition will be co-judged by none other than former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion and National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke. Welsh poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch will continue in her role as competition filter judge.

The competition is now open and accepting entries. The first prize-winner will walk away 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.

So if you think you have what it takes to delight our judges and get your hands on the top prize of £5,000, then send us 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 Literature Wales. Full guidelines and Conditions of Entry can be found in the entry form.

Click here to download a copy of the entry form
or to receive a hard copy in the post, send a stamped, self addressed envelope to:
CIPC13, Literature Wales, 4th Floor, Cambrian Buildings,
Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff CF10 5FL

For more information on the 2013 Cardiff International Poetry Competition,
contact Literature Wales on: 029 2047 2266 / post@literaturewales.org

The 2013 Cardiff International Poetry Competition is administered by Literature Wales
and supported by Cardiff Council.

Source: Press release

Exclusive Interview with Mark Tredinnick, 2012 Cardiff International Poetry Competition Winner

Your poem, ‘Margaret River Sestets’, won this year’s Cardiff International Poetry Competition – what inspired the poem and the poem’s format?

First, thanks so much for your interest in my work.

“Margaret River Sestets” is written in very long-lined stanzas, and one or two lines of each sestet are stepped down. It’s an architecture I’ve used quite often - “Eclogues” and “The Economics of Spring” and several other poems in my first collection Fire Diary, for instance - since I discovered a version of it in the poetry of the great Charles Wright. That form - loose and yet formal at once - felt like my native habitat, from the start. The long lines seem to suit my syntax and the rhythms of my poetic thought and witness; Linda Rogers, the Canadian poet, who also won the Cardiff one year, described my long lines as “bowings” - the kind I used to make on a cello, when I played. In “MRS”, the brokenness of the lines articulates the brokenness of the country (Margaret River lies in the southwest of Australia) and of the speaker of the poem.

I am a poet who seems to need form, some blueprint of the rooms of the poem’s house, before the poem will find him. “MRS” is what I’d call a post-pastoral: a response to stricken and beautiful country; a way of coming to poetic terms, at the same time, with a heart, or perhaps a soul, in need of the kind of healing metaphor and speech music (in long and broken lines) alone can perform - along with the wild music of landscape itself. I wrote the poem because that landscape deserved, and seemed to insist upon, the best poetic response I could manage. I wrote the poem to see if I could order a somewhat disordered self. I wrote the poem, as I often do, because I had some other work I ought to have been doing (an essay this time, on the work of another poet); I seem to need to steal time for poems from other projects (critical essays, web copy for clients…) that I have no choice but to write and really ought to be getting down to. I need, apparently, a poem to be illicit. And so this one was.

You have won several major poetry prizes and literary awards, have 3 published collections of poetry, 4 prose collections and 4 writing guides (with 3 further collections due for publication in 2013) – is there anything else you would like to achieve in your literary career?

You make this sound like a prodigious body of work, and me like a medium-sized writing factory. It’s not, and I’m not, like that at all - though, thanks for mentioning the body of work to which “MRS” belongs. At fifty, I feel I’m only just learning how to write, as if all the work I sometimes feel I’m here to get done lies out in front of me. I don’t think of my writing life as a career, but I do think of what I’m doing as a calling. And it’s my hope that I can continue to make out the right thing to write next and to see and learn the way to get it done. If I write nothing else from here to the end than poems, I’ll die happy. But I keep writing prose - essays, memoir, nature pieces, criticism - and it seems to suit me and to counterbalance the poetry, so I suppose I’ll keep writing that, too. I have a couple of ideas, but most of the prose I’ll write will present itself to me - a commission, a compulsion - when its time is right. There may be a children’s book in me, and a novel. A memoir of some kind later. Who knows? I’m very glad to have been able to get written the books you allude to, and one or two of them (The Blue Plateau, The Little Red Writing Book, Fire Diary, Australia’s Wild Weather) I’m fond and proud of. Naturally, I’m thrilled and astonished and gratified by the prizes, the Montreal Prize late last year, which changed the game for me, and the Cardiff this year: prizes help finance the silence on which the poetry depends, and they help people remember your name and read your work and ask, now and then, if you could send them some new poems. That’s very good, and I’m thankful, but the lapsed Methodist in me keeps letting me know I’m only as good as my next poem. And that I have been blessed, and that now the real work starts.

The continued freedom to write is what I mostly pray for - in a secular kind of way - and the capacity to keep learning better ways to get out of my own way and let the poems that want to find me, find me, and find their way, through my hand, out into the world. I’d like to keep writing poems, and perhaps some other works, that tell some pieces of the big story small, that redeem a few moments and serve, somehow, the planet; that do some kind of justice and remake some souls, including my own, and give a few people back to their real lives (the ones they’re too busy or anxious to live); that help a few readers make sense of the madness around them; that cry the beauty of the much put-upon earth; my hope is to keep making poems that recharge the language, and cry the peril and the joy of creation, that conserve language and love and landscape, some poems that throw some soft bombs at the usual suspects.

You were a lawyer, before moving into book publishing – what inspired that move?

Have you ever tried being a lawyer?! Okay, enough said. Publishing was fun and noble, and I learned a lot about writing and editing, and it was an escape for me from the aridity of law and the tyranny of the time-sheet, but I was, in reality, and increasingly I knew it, edging closer, in book publishing, to the writing life I’d known since I was a child writing I was meant to lead, if I could. There was hardly a moment in book publishing, even the good moments, when I didn’t feel like a man wearing someone else’s clothes. I knew in the end I’d jump the desk and sit in the writer’s chair. After ten years in publishing (Butterworths, Allen & Unwin, HarperCollins), the division I was running was sold, and I had a chance to walk away with a cheque in my hands. That was 1996, and I’ve been writing and teaching ever since, and my clothes fit me much better now.

For readers who are unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe it?

Fellow Australian poet Judith Beveridge was kind enough once to say of me that The Blue Plateau (a work of lyric prose) and Fire Diary (my first collection of poetry) “establish Mark as one of our great writers of place—not just of geographic place, but of the moral and spiritual landscape as well.” She catches my poetry’s territory very well in those words. Andrew Motion described “Walking Underwater”, which won the Montreal International Poetry Prize last year, as “a bold, big-thinking poem, in which ancient themes (especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape) are recast and rekindled.” And his words neatly characterise my poetry, my whole literary project. I think my poems are both hard and easy: easy, in that resonant simplicity and musicality of speech are articles of faith with me; hard, in that, as a reader once put it, my lines “trail a lot of hooks.” You’ll see what I mean, and what that reader meant, and what Beveridge and Motion mean, if you read “MRS”; it is a characteristic poem in its concerns, its landscape witness, its musical play with natural history, mythology, psychology, cosmology, philosophy and “divine sense”. But its lines are the longest and the most replete with - with everything - that I’ve ever written. I have another writing self, who now and then manufactures short-lined, simply articulated lyrics, often about birds and children and people and places and trees I love. I am a poet of wonder.

I am a mystic; I am a secular sort of pantheist. I write the physical and the metaphysical; I don’t trade much in the social, I’m afraid. I’ve never found society especially compelling. Soul, yes; landscape, yes; love, yes; questions of justice and freedom, yes. But not everyday norms and felonies. I write - and value - birds and music and land forms - lots of forms. I write about death and how to survive it. I write intimacy and cosmology, often at the same time. Much of my work is what might be called confessional, though the “I” of my lyrics and eclogues should never be mistaken for my biographical self. A poem arises in the place where one’s self bleeds - in love or grief or longing or wonder - into the Self; the personal becomes the human; the particular the universal. In one poem I write: “I’m writing a kind of confessional ecology here, and you mustn’t believe a word.”

I’ve just done a long interview with Kath Stansfield for New Welsh Review. That interview will give you a very clear idea of the kind of poet and man I am:
http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=344#pagetop


Are there any poetry collections that you can recommend to our readers?

My own? Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, 2010, which you’ll have to buy through me or the publisher here in Australia; we’re not on Amazon or the Book Depository); The Lyrebird (a little chapbook, published in 2011 by Picaro Press, again only available on line or from me); The Road South, a CD on which I read twenty poemsm - this is available much more readily, even track by track, from CD baby, Amazon and others. The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir (2009) is available from Amazon and The Book Depository. You can sample my poems on The Poetry Archive; you can sample a few others on the website of The Poetry Foundation in the US. On both sites you can read biographical notes and a few of my poems, AND you can download some poems in voice form. You can read and hear “Walking Underwater” on the website of the Montreal Poetry Prize, and you can read “MRS” on the Cardiff Prize site. I’d recommend the Global Anthology put out by the Montreal Prize this year; it includes the fifty shortlisted poems, and they come from all over the world.

Will you be visiting the UK anytime soon, to be part of a literary festival or on a book tour?

I have no plans to be in the UK soon, but I have hopes. Something - a festival, a reading tour, some teaching, a residency, talks with publishers - will take me to the UK sometime before the poles melt completely. It seems unlikely I’ll be able to get across for the Cardiff Prize Awards night, much as I’d like to: Cardiff is along way and a long time from Sydney, and small arts bodies and workaday poets don’t have much spare cash lying about for airfares. But whatever it is that takes me to the UK, I want to come to Wales. I’ll keep you posted.

Where can readers find out more about your work?

My website is a place to start: www.marktredinnick.com.au. There are plenty of leads on there. Also the Poetry Archive and the Poetry Foundation.

Many thanks to Mark Tredinnick for answering our questions.

Australian Poet Wins £5,000 in 2012 Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Entries to the Cardiff International Poetry Competition arrive each year by the sack-full from poets spread across the globe, as well as from within Wales and the rest of the UK. In 2012 the truly international reputation of the competition continues as the judges award First Prize of £5,000 to multi award-winning poet Mark Tredinnick from Australia.

Mark was awarded the prize by judges Patrick McGuinness and Sinéad Morrissey for his poem ‘Margaret River Sestets’. No stranger to competition success he has won many Australian poetry awards, including the Blake and Newcastle Prizes and last year he won the prestigious Montreal International Poetry Prize. Mark, who lives with his family on the Wingecarribee River, southwest of Sydney, has been described as “one of our great poets of place - not just of geographic place, but of the spiritual and moral landscape as well” (Judith Beveridge). He has published eleven works of poetry and prose and a second volume of poetry, Body Copy, will appear in 2013, along with a memoir, Reading Slowly at the End of Time.

On receiving his prize Mark said: “The Cardiff International Poetry Competition is one of the world's great poetry prizes, and it's a joy to win it this year with a poem that evokes country a long, long way from Wales - a fair way, even, from New South Wales, where I live.”

Second Prize of £500 was awarded to Jonathan Edwards from Crosskeys in south Wales for his poem ‘Evel Knievel Jumps Over My Family’. Jonathan was awarded a Literature Wales New Writer’s Bursary in 2011 and won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010. His first poetry collection, My Family and Other Superheroes, is forthcoming from Welsh publisher Seren Books. Digital editor and Creative Writing tutor Harry Man from London was awarded Third Prize of £250 for his poem ‘Lost Ordinance, Sussex, 1943’. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and journals including New Welsh Review and in 2011 Harry produced a contemporary dance and poetry collaboration for the London College of Fashion.

The top three winning poems will appear exclusively in print and digital formats in New Welsh Review 97, published on Saturday 1st September 2012.

The five equal runners-up in the competition each receiving £50 are: Annemarie Austin from Weston-Super-Mare for her poem ‘Cremated Girl’; Ben Holden from Bristol for his poem ‘The Lepidopterist’; Brett Evans from Conwy for his poem ‘Directed by Sergio Leone’; Jo Hemmant from Tonbridge for her poem ‘The Portreeve's House, East Street’; and Kathryn Simmonds from London for her poem ‘The San Michele Cemetery’.

Click here to find out more about the 2012 winners and to read their prize-winning poems.

The Cardiff International Poetry Competition is administered by Literature Wales and supported by Cardiff Council. The 2013 competition will be launched in autumn this year. The 2012 competition was judged by poets Patrick McGuinness, Sinéad Morrissey and filter judge Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch.

Source: Literature Wales