The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society

OPEN TO POEMS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD

DEADLINE 31 JANUARY 2026

We are pleased to announce that our annual Open Poetry Competition is now open for entries. It will be judged this year by poetry legend, Mimi Khalvati.

Mimi Khalvati was born in Iran, and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She has lived most of her life in London. After training at Drama Centre London, she worked as an actor in the UK and as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran and on the fringe in London. She has published ten poetry collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, The Weather Wheel, a PBS Commendation and a book of the year in The Independent, and Afterwardness, a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She was a co-winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition 1989 and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa as the recipient of the William B. Quarton International Writing Program Scholarship, at the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, City University. She is the founder of The Poetry School and has co-edited its three anthologies of new writing published by Enitharmon Press. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Award and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society. In 2023 she was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2025 she won the inaugural Jhalak Poetry Prize with her Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2024).

The deadline for entries is 31st January 2026

As in previous years, we offer seven prizes:

1st Prize: £1000

2nd Prize: £300

3rd Prize: £100

4th Prize: 4 x £50

Entry fee: £5 per poem; or, for 3 or more poems, £4 each. (PLEASE PAY USING THE PAYPAL BUTTONS BELOW)

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ENTRY IS BY EMAIL ONLY

Deadline for receipt of entries: 31^st January 2026.

Any number of poems can be submitted, on payment of £5 per poem, or £4 each for three poems or more.

• The competition is for anyone aged 16 and over, from anywhere in the world.
• Poems must be in English, your original work, on any subject, in any style, no longer than 40 lines.
• Poems should have not been published elsewhere (including self-published) by 21st April 2026. Nor should they be entered into any other competition for which the results will be announced before 21st April 2026.

Please send your poems by email to kentandsussexpoetry@gmail.com in a single Word or pdf attachment, formatted A4, and with each poem starting on a new page, after paying the entry fee using the PayPal buttons below. Please do not sent multiple files, or files in other formats than Word or pdf.

Please ensure the poem is formatted as you wish it to be read. If the form is complex, it is advisable to use a pdf format.

All poems are judged anonymously, so should not bear your name, nor any other form of identification. 

In your covering email, please give:

• Your name and postal address
• A list of the titles of all poems submitted
• The date you made your Paypal payment (and the name under which it was made, if not your own).

We will acknowledge receipt of entries by means of an automated reply. Prize winners only will be contacted with news of the judge’s decision, by mid-April. The results will be announced on our website on April 22nd, 2026.

All entries are read by the judge, whose decision is final. There can be no correspondence concerning the result. No person may win more than one prize.

Prize-winning poems will be posted on our website, and also included in our annual Folio publication. Prize winners will also be invited to read their poems at our monthly meeting in Tunbridge Wells on April 21st 2026, where Mimi will also read from her own work.

Closing Date: 31st January 2026 (midnight, UK time).

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