This year we have a new role in the Bournemouth Writing Festival’s competition. The BWF are teaming up with Bournemouth University to award the Bournemouth Writing Prize and we have been asked to judge the poetry element of the competition and, again, publish the anthology of winners.

This is a great honour and we look forward to seeing the shortlisted poems. The deadline for the competition is January 15th 2025 and more details can be found on the Bournemouth Writing Prize page and the Festival Competition page.

Thanks to everyone who sent in their ten pages for our 2024 Submissions Window. We were blown away by Nicole Durman’s Ghosts of Nightshifts Past, and she was our choice for publication. Her collection will be out in Summer 2025. You can read more about her in our blogs.

We are now accepting submissions throughout the year. For more information, please go to our Submissions page.

Our next cut-off for submissions will be March 2025, at which point we will select our longlist for this reading period. We'll shortlist five authors in April, one of whom will be published towards the end of the year. So, if your collection is ready to go, there is plenty of time for you to send us your sample ten pages.

We have nominated six of our published poems for the prestigious Pushcart Prize 2025.

The winners will be announced in May and we have our fingers crossed for our worthy nominees:

Louise Walker's 'The Swing' - published in 'From There to Here'

Louise Walker's 'Pilgrimage' - published in 'From There to Here'

Anne Peterson's 'Catching the early coach from Elhovo' - published in 'Going Home'

Partridge Boswell's 'Georgic' - published in 'Lines in the Sand'

Julia Rapp's 'To My Future Ex-Husband, With Love' - published in 'Lines in the Sand'

Tessa Foley's 'Where All the Vibrators Go' - - published in 'Lines in the Sand'