New Voices First Pamphlet Award winners in 2022.
Closing date: 31 July 2023
Our Third New Voices Competition again offers poets aged 25 or younger the opportunity to win a New Voices First Pamphlet Award. The award funds publication of award-winners’ first poetry book published and promoted by Frosted Fire. The judging team will read all the entries, then last year’s award winners, Bethan Manley & Katherine Parsons, will jointly select a long list, then a short list, of potential winners. The final adjudication will be by Marilyn Timms, co-publisher of wildfire words and Frosted Fire.
Each prize book will be published as a pamphlet, which will contain 24 to 32 pages of poetry. Entries for the competition should be a single file containing between 8 and 10 poems that showcase the poet’s work.
- The contest is open to poets worldwide except volunteers for Wildfire Words/Frosted Fire. Entrants must be 25 or less on the day they submit their entry. This is a contest for poets seeking to have their first poetry book published, so poets who are offered an award must be unpublished and not contracted for publication of any poetry book by an independent publisher. (Self-published books don’t disqualify a poet, but their competition entry must be different poems.)
- All poems must be entirely the entrant’s own work. Individual poems in an entry may have been published online, in journals or magazines, or multi-author anthologies, provided the writer retains copyright.
- Each entry should contain 8 to 10 poems of no more than 70 lines per poem including stanza breaks. Each poem should start on a new page and preferably use 12 pt Calibri type (or similar sanserif face). Winners will be invited to submit enough poems for a 32-page pamphlet.
- You may submit up to three entries, each of 10 poems, provided an entry fee is paid for each.
- Your entry’s title should appear on a separate first page. The title may relate to a key poem or suggest the collection’s theme if it has one. The title must also be the name of the file containing your poems.
- To maintain anonymous judging, there must be no identifying marks on any poem or title page. Your entry must not contain any poem that might be recognized by any of the judges through workshops, mentoring, or public readings. We will match your entry title to your email address after anonymous judging is complete.
- Each entry must have all the poems in one file in Word or PDF format. If possible, please set the page size to A5 format or 6 x 8 inches.
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but an entry must be withdrawn in the event of it winning a prize or publication elsewhere. Entry fees are not refundable once an entry has been received.
- Work will not be returned, so please keep a copy.
- We are unable to give feedback on individual entries or on the results of the competition — the judges’ decisions are final.
- Results will be emailed by 6 September to all who entered, and published on wildfire words shortly afterwards.
- An Early Bard discounted entry fee of £9 per entry, or £24 for 3 entries is available until 30 June. After that the entry fee will be £11 each or £30 for 3.
- Entries must be paid for (by debit or credit card or your PayPal account) and your entry file uploaded, by the closing time of 11.59 pm on 31 July.
Payments are collected by PayPal on behalf of Frosted Fire, but you do not need a PayPal account if paying by credit or debit card. If you have any issues with paying or entering, please contact us by clicking on this link,
wildfire-words.com 