The 2022 McLellan Poetry Competition is now open for entries. But, the closing date for submissions is Sunday 10th July so don’t delay!
The winners will be announced as part of the McLellan Festival on the Isle of Arran on Sunday 28th August.
The McLellan Poetry Prize is awarded by the Arran Theatre and Arts Trust as part of the annual McLellan Arts Festival, which is returning this year after a Covid enforced break. The festival dates are 25th August – 4th September, with the inaugural WeeMac Children’s book festival taking place the following weekend on the 9th and 10th September 2022.
Now in its fifteenth year, past judges of the poetry competition have included Kathleen Jamie, Robert Crawford, Jackie Kay, Peter and Ann Sansom, Michael Laskey, Simon Armitage, David Constantine, Maura Dooley, Sinéad Morrissey, Sean O’Brien and Luke Wright.
This year we are really excited to announce that the judge will be the wonderful Hollie McNish.
Hollie McNish is a poet and author based between Glasgow and Cambridge. She won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her poetic parenting memoir – Nobody Told Me – of which The Scotsman stated ‘The World Needs this Book’. She has published four further collections of poetry – Papers, Cherry Pie, Plum and her most recent poetic memoir Slug…and Other Things I’ve Been Told to Hate, which is a Sunday Times Bestseller. With fellow poet Sabrina Mahfouz, she co-wrote Offside, a play relating the history of UK women’s football, and has just completed a re-imagining of Sophocles’ Greek Tragedy Antigone, published in October 2021 with Hachette. Hollie loves writing. Her poetry has been translated into German, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Japanese and French. She is a patron of Baby Milk Action.
For more information about the competition and the entry form, see here
Best of luck to all our poets submitting!
You can keep up to date with the competition by following the McLellan Poetry Facebook page