Hard times happen (and it's okay to talk about them)

One of my current projects as Worcestershire Poet Laureate is to collaborate with Worcestershire LitFest and Fringe and Time To Change, Worcestershire, on a very special competition. 

The team at Worcestershire LitFest and Fringe, myself included, pride ourselves on being strong advocates for mental health charities, support systems and organisations. To further this support, we’re delighted to announce that for the next couple of months we will be opening our doors to writing around this theme, in the form of our new writing competition: Hard times happen (and it’s okay to talk about them).

In partnership with Time To Change (Worcester), we are welcoming entries of poetry or short prose written to the ‘hard times happen’ theme. However, before you click out and think this one isn’t for you, let us clarify a couple of things:

1. You do not have to live in a Worcestershire postcode to enter this competition. It’s available worldwide over and we’re delighted to see entries from around the nation, or the globe if we’re especially lucky.


2. You do not have to suffer from a mental health condition to enter this competition. At Worcestershire LitFest we know as well as anyone that hard times can and do indeed happen, whether you have a formal diagnosis of a condition or not. So this is a poetry competition for life’s difficulties and our freedom to discuss those difficulties with others.

Entry to this competition is entirely free and we will be accepting entries until midnight on April 30th. When the competition closes our esteemed judges – Worcestershire Poet Laureate, Dr Charley Barnes (myself, that is), and Worcestershire LitFest and Fringe Director, Martin Driscoll – will read through the entries to determine which pieces will be placed in the winning anthology, which will be produced at the end of this process.

We’re currently planning a formal anthology launch, where competition entrants are welcome to come and read their work, and priced copies of the anthology will be available here too. At the moment we’re looking to arrange this event for some time in June 2020, but we will be able to confirm a specific date a little closer to the time.

So, everything you need to know in bite-size chunks:
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1. You do not need to live in Worcestershire, nor do you need to have a mental health condition, to enter this competition.
2. Entry is entirely free.
3. We are accepting entries until April 30th.
4. We are accepting submissions of poetry and short prose (poetry should be no more than 40 lines and prose should be no longer than approximately one typed A4 page).
5. All entries should be emailed to competitions@worcesterlitfest.co.uk.
6. When you email your submission please ensure that the subject line reads: ‘Hard times happen competition entry’. We are running multiple competitions at the moment and we wouldn’t want anyone’s entry to become lost in among other competitions.

If you have any questions about the competition or the finer details of it then you are welcome to log your queries at the competitions@worcesterlitfest.co.uk email address, or you can contact me using the Contact Form on this website. 
We look forward to reading your entries!

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