February Competitions

I have reorganised my lists of writing competitions and added ones with deadlines in February. I hope collecting all the details on one page is helpful.

I have reorganised my lists of writing competitions and added ones with deadlines in February. I hope collecting all the details on one page is helpful.

The Tom Grass Prize is for stories with a sense of place and adventure. The top prize is £1,000 plus a conversation with a literary agent.

We are restarting our ‘Writer of the Month’ competition!
The theme this month is “Light and Dark”, fitting for this time of year and the times we are living in. Entries can be prose or poetry but should be short – flash fiction or a single stanza of verse. Entries should be a Word document attached to an email, or in the body of an email. Please send them to Stella at:

You will then be sent all the entries to read and asked to return your vote for the top three. The closing date will be Friday January 23rd and voting will close shortly afterwards. The winner will be announced and published on the website. There is no prize except recognition and we hope, a bit of motivation and inspiration!

Another list of writing competitions with deadlines in the coming month.

The Globe Soup Open competition, with a Grand Prize of £2,000, closes on 16 December.

The Daily Telegraph has a poetry competition. UK residents only, no cash prize but a year’s subscription, publication and performance in a short film. The theme is ‘Mothers’.
My latest list is here.


Our anthology of entries to the Michael Round Prize is now available on Amazon! The paperback is priced at £8.99 and the Kindle version at £3.00 (outside the UK it may be a few days more before it appears). The cover design, by our own Jo Bodley, includes elements that refer to several of the stories. The main pomegranate motif is from the Palestinian embroidery tradition of tatreez, mentioned in the winning story.
Please do buy copies (they make great Christmas presents) and give us good reviews.

You can now read entries from the shortlist for the Michael Round Prize! This includes the entries which came first and second. The results were officially announced at our meeting on 10 November.
Winner: We only Had One Religion (Hashmi-Al-Haseeb Faisal)
Second Place: Sniggery Wood (Stuart Wilks-Heeg)
Missing (Celia Gatward)
Why Don’t You Just Keep Going (Benjamin Graham)
Dust to Dust (Katie Weatherford)
Austentatious Dames (Fay Dickinson) has been retained for possible publication elsewhere.

Here is my latest list of writing competitions…