Marsden the Poetry Village Competition

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Patience Agbabi will be judging the 2019 Marsden the Poetry Village (MPV) International Poetry Competition for poems submitted on the theme of “Together”, with a deadline of 1st June 2019. First prize is £300, second £100 and a third-place £50 prize.

Winning entries and those of selected runners-up will appear in a competition anthology, to be published in Autumn 2019, (subject to funding). This will also contain poems selected from local poetry workshops run for children and young people as part of a project funded by local charities.

Marsden the Poetry Village is a group of enthusiasts creating poetry initiatives within its community and nearby, including poetry pubs and cafes where customers can read poetry books whilst drinking a beer or coffee; regular poems on posters in shop windows in the village too.

Marsden is a West Yorkshire Pennine village with a plethora of community and cultural activities, like a community cinema, library-based authors’ readings, regular live music, Mechanics’ Institute cultural centre, Mikron canal-boat-based travelling theatre, a renowned Jazz Festival, and its Imbolc and Cuckoo Festivals.

Marsden is Oxford Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage’s birthplace, that of Victorian dialect poet Samuel Laycock and extant published and performing poets; it is the Stanza Stones trail starting point, has a successful, long-running monthly poetry night and other poetry events, and is the home of international poetry organisation Write Out Loud.

Marsden the Poetry Village recognises, with grateful thanks, the contributions made to this initiative by local charities the Marsden Cuckoo’s Nest, Avalanche Dodgers and One Community.

The fee to enter is £4. If multiple poems are entered in the same submission, £10 will be charged for three poems and then £3 for each subsequent poem.

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Patience Agbabi’s poetry has been featured on radio and TV worldwide and she has spent over 20 years celebrating the written and spoken word. Active on the literature and arts scene, she was on the Council of Management for Arvon from 2009 to 2016. Her poem, ‘The Doll’s House’, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2014. She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and is a former Poet Laureate of Canterbury. The author of four books, her latest, Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014), is a vivid retelling of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for New Work in Poetry 2014 and Wales Book of the Year 2015.

“The liveliest versions of Chaucer you're likely to read” Simon Armitage.