The Prose Poem: Prose Poetry 1 poem Fee: gbp £3.00

We welcome submissions of prose poems of up to 500 words on any subject for our annual prose poetry competition.

Prizes:

• First place: £100 plus publication
• Second place: £50 plus publication
• Third place: £25 plus publication
• Honourable mention: £10 plus publication

Submission fees are:

• 1 poem £3
  
• 2 poems £4.50
  
• 3 poems £6
  
• Free submission are available for underrepresented writers and writers who cannot afford the submission fee. You do not need to give a reason for taking this option and your poem will not be at any disadvantage if you use the free entry. If you would like to make use of this, please email us at [email protected] for details.
  

Submission Call

• We are currently reading prose poems of up to 500 words on any subject. We welcome micro (prose) poetry and other very short forms, as well as hybrid forms and ‘hermit crab’ poems that adopt the structure of other forms of writing (such as lists, forms, recipes, etc.).
• We only publish prose poetry. We're happy to read work that is on (or perhaps a little past) the fuzzy boundaries of prose poetry and narrative poetry, free verse, microfiction, flash fiction, etc., but poems intentionally formatted with line breaks and stanzas are unlikely to be a good fit for us.
• We publish all poems that receive a cash prize (first, second and third place, plus honourable mentions). We offer publication to all shortlisted pieces and some longlisted pieces as well, but when you submit, you may opt not to publish with us if you do not win a cash prize. (Opting out will not affect the competition judging in any way.) We will confirm a poem's availability before publishing.

Timeline

• The competition is open for submissions from 15 July – 15 October
• The longlist will be announced by 30 October
• The shortlist will be announced by 15 November
• Winners will be announced by 30 November

Unlike many competitions, we will be reading throughout the submission period, so you may receive a notification that you are on the longlist or that your poem is no longer being considered before the submission window is over. Prize winners and honourable mentions will not be determined until after the competition closing date.

Submission Guidelines

• You may submit as many times as you like, with a maximum of three poems per submission. Please choose the correct submission call. This call is for ONE poem.
• We prefer .doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf, and .txt documents. If your piece relies heavily on formatting, please send us a pdf. (We will request another format if the poem is accepted for publication.)
• Please do not include your name or personal details in the title or text of your document.
• We publish on our website which is designed to be readable on many sizes of screens and which may not support unusual formatting decisions. Please keep this in mind when submitting. In some cases, we may have to publish poems as an image, or work with an author to find alternative formatting options.
• We welcome simultaneous submissions but we only accept unpublished work. Please withdraw your piece by emailing us asap if it is picked up elsewhere. No refunds can be given.
• We define previously published work as work that has appeared in other journals or on personal websites that are freely available. You are welcome to submit work that has appeared in private, password-protected writers’ forums and critique groups. If you have any questions, feel free to email us.

Terms of publication

• All winning and highly commended pieces will be published on our website and will remain online for the lifetime of this project.
• We request first online publication rights and a period of exclusivity for six months after publication (though we are happy to make exceptions for anthologies, collections, awards, translations and other projects; feel to contact us). Copyright remains with the author at all times.
• Payment for prize-winning poetry can be made via PayPal or UK bank transfer.