The Magdalena Young Poets' Prize 2021/2022 - Competition Rules and How to Enter

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE 2021/2022 COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED TO ENTRIES. WATCH THIS SPACE FOR THE RESULTS!

- The competition will open on 1st November 2021.

- All entries must be received by 11.59pm on 1st February 2022 in order to be eligible. We won’t be accepting entries after this date.

- The competition is open to anyone aged 16-25 (inclusive), residing in the UK. You need to be within this age range on the day you submit your poem.

- If you are under 18, please ask a parent or guardian for permission before you enter. If you send us your poem, we will assume you have read this and therefore asked for and been given permission.

- Your poem must be no longer than 20 lines. This does not include the title, white spaces between stanzas, or any epigraphs/dedications. It can be as short as you like.

- Please email us at themagdalenayoungpoetsprize@gmail.com with your entry – copy-and-paste the email address, as this is a spam avoidance technique. Within the body of the email, please include your full name and date of birth (please give us your full date of birth, preferably in DD/MM/YYYY format, rather than just your age), whereabouts in the UK you're based (e.g. the city, county or region) and your poem’s title. It's also handy for us to know where people are hearing about us, so if you could also mention where you heard about us (e.g. Twitter, the National Poetry Library website) we'd really appreciate it. Ideally, we'd like you to copy-and-paste your poem into the email – that would be our preference – but we're fine with Microsoft Word documents (.doc or .docx files) too. We understand that some poems have specific formatting that needs to be preserved, and as far as such poems are concerned we'd be willing to accept PDFs, but please only send us a PDF if you can't preserve your poem's formatting in any other way.

- We will only be accepting typed entries, submitted by email. If it isn't possible for you to enter by email or to type up your poem, please get in touch with us via our website form, social media or email, and we'll sort something out for you. If you have any technical difficulties, please do get in touch and we'll do all we can to help.

- Please use a clear 12-point font – Times New Roman is a good one.

- It’s completely free to enter, but we do ask for just one poem per entrant. If you send us more than one poem, we’ll only judge the first one you send us.

- Your poem must be written in English.

- If you’ve previously self-published your poem in a book, on your own blog or on any of your own social media accounts, that’s fine by us and your entry will still be eligible. However, if your poem has ever been selected by someone else for publication anywhere, in print or online, or has placed or been shortlisted/commended in any other competition, then we won’t be able to accept it, out of fairness to other entrants.

- We can't accept edits or changes to an entry once it's been submitted.

- Your poem can be on any subject...if the subject speaks to you, we'd love to hear about it. Poems on challenging subjects are more than welcome (in fact, we want to see your poems on challenging subjects!) and poems that include swearing are permitted (although it’s always a good idea to make sure that, if you use swear words, they contribute to the poem in terms of voice, mood or sound, rather than being there for shock value). Please do not send us anything racist, ableist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or offensive in any other way, though – if entries comprise or endorse hate speech or bullying, we will not put them forward for judging. Nor will we put forward entries that endorse or glamorise abuse of any kind. If you're unsure about the content or tone of your poem and how it's coming across, we suggest asking someone you trust (like a friend or family member, a teacher or lecturer, or a workshop group) to read it and give you their opinion. Unfortunately, neither we nor our judge will have the time to give individual feedback on poems.

- The winner of first prize will receive £200, with second place receiving £100 and third place receiving £50. The winner of the Dragonfly Prize for Potential will win £25 worth of book vouchers.

- We'll be hosting a virtual awards ceremony via Zoom, where we can meet our lovely entrants and virtually present the prizes which will be posted out to the winners. Everyone is very welcome to join us, for free, at our ceremony. We'll be sharing more details nearer the time.

- After the results have been announced and the prizes have been awarded, we’d really like to share the winning poems here on our website and on our social media pages. If you’re selected and would rather we didn’t do that, though, that’s no problem at all and this won’t affect your eligibility.

- We’ll aim to contact our winners and post the results here on our website by the beginning of April 2022. If we’re running behind schedule, we’ll let all our entrants know. Stay in touch with us on social media for all the information you'll need.

- We reserve the right not to award prizes if we don’t get an adequate number of entries, or if our judge feels that’s justified.

- We reserve the right to change our judge without notice if we need to.

- If we discover that your work is plagiarised, or that you are ineligible for any other reason, we will have no option but to disqualify your entry. We reserve the right to ask you to return your prize if, following awarding you that prize, we find your work to be plagiarised or discover that it was ineligible for any other reason, such as your being outside the eligible age range.

- We promise our judging will be fair and unbiased. We will be judging anonymously. The decision will be final and no individual correspondence can be entered into regarding that decision.

Data Protection: We need your full name (this does not have to be your legal name; preferred names are welcome - we just need a first and a surname), date of birth, email address, location (please don't give us your full postal address; if we need your address for any reason, we'll ask you having clearly explained why we need it) and poem at this stage, and we will not share these with any third party. If we need further information from you, we’ll contact you via email. Once the prizes have been awarded, we will permanently delete all of our entrants’ data. If you would like to withdraw your entry or ask us to delete your data or correspondence, you can do this at any time by emailing themagdalenayoungpoetsprize@gmail.com

We know this is a fair bit of information to take in, so if you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, via email or any of our social media accounts. We can’t wait to receive your entries!