Tag: writing

Poets Anonymous

Jun 27, 2025

Members might be interested to hear about the regular local monthly sessions of Poets Anonymous. They meet in person on the First Friday of the month at Ruskin House, 23 Coombe Rd, Croydon CR0 1BD, from 8pm. The cost for attending is a very reasonable £2.

If you can’t get there in person, they also meet on Zoom on the Third Friday of the month at 8pm. Log-in details are sent out the day before.

To sign up for an online session or for further details please contact peter@poetsanon.org.uk

Michael Round Prize

Jun 1, 2025

The Michael Round Prize is now closed. The winner will be announced at our November meeting.

The competition…

  • was free to enter,
  • accepted stories up to 1,200 words on the theme ‘Far and Wide’,
  • offered prizes of £100 and £50
  • was open until 30 September 2025.

The full rules are here.

9 June – Open Meeting

May 31, 2025

Our meeting on 9 June was an open meeting, for sharing, reading work, and discussion. We read our work, which covered a variety of topics from the humble pressure cooker, a handbag, this “island of strangers”, childhood memories and death. 

12 May – Will Noble

May 13, 2025
Ethel, who presented the meeting, with Will and a copy of his book.

The greatest city that never was? At the 12 May meeting, Will Noble gave us an entertaining view of the history of our town, based on his book Croydonopolis, enjoyed by meany members and now in paperback. Will highlighted Croydon’s long story of bold innovations and early failures, with an undaunted determination fuelled by men such as Archbishop John Whitgift and Sir James Marshall, a persistence which has carried through many rejected bids for official city status up to the present day.

Will told us his sights were originally set on scriptwriting, but instead he developed a career on the Londonist website, which he now edits. He plans to do more non-fiction one day, but his next book – you heard it here first – will probably be fiction. We look forward to it.

A Croydon Writing Competition?

Jan 8, 2025

We are thinking of running a writing competition this year and would be interested in views. We provisionally thought that the competition should:

  • be called ‘The Michael Round Prize’,
  • be free to enter,
  • offer a first prize of £100 and a second prize of £50,
  • open for entries in June and close in September,
  • be open to anyone (ie not just members),
  • accept prose pieces between 1,000 and 3,000 words,
  • require pieces to be on the theme ‘Far and Wide’,
  • be judged by a panel responsible for producing a shortlist with final placings decided by a ‘celebrity’ judge (if we can get one),
  • require entries to be submitted by email, and
  • allow only one entry per person.

All of these points are very much open for discussion – let us know your thoughts in a comment, email, or at our next meeting.

Update: we discussed these suggestions at the January meeting. Members were broadly in agreement but thought the suggested theme sounded old-fashioned, and that a small entry fee was worth considering. The idea of a competition anthology was popular and members thought we might need to establish a competition sub-committee.

This will be discussed again at the February meeting – if you have ideas for a theme in the meantime, please email them to ecorduff@hotmail.com