Premier competition for young poets opens for entries
We are delighted to announce the opening of the annual Christopher Tower Poetry Competition, which offers the UK’s most valuable prize for young poets. The competition is free to enter and open to students between 16 and 18 years of age who are educated in the UK. This year, participants are challenged to write a poem on the theme of 'ROOTS'.
The competition is judged anonymously by two guest judges and the Christopher Tower Student in Poetry in the English Language. In this, the 25th year of the competition, the Christopher Tower Student, Dr Anna Nickerson, will be joined as judge by Camille Ralphs and Lemn Sissay OBE, who bring extensive experience not only as poets but also with a wide variety of associated forms of writing and performance, from criticism to life-writing, and across a range of media.
We are enormously grateful that poets of such calibre and expertise will be participating in the work of judging the competition this year.
We are enormously grateful that poets of such calibre and expertise will be participating in the work of judging the competition this year.
Camille Ralphs is a poet and critic, and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her first collection of poems, After You Were, I Am, was published by Faber and Faber in March. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including the New York Review of Books, The Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Lemn Sissay is a poet, playwright, memoirist and broadcaster. His latest book Let The Light Pour In is a Sunday Times bestseller. He has performed throughout the world from The Library of Congress in the United States to the Ethiopian National Theatre in Addis Ababa to the London Palladium in England. His television documentaries have been nominated for Grierson BAFTA and RTS awards. His work in radio has been nominated for Sony Awards and the Palm D’Ors.
Commenting on this year's judge lineup, Christ Church's Professor Mishtooni Bose, Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Medieval Poetry in English, said: 'We are enormously grateful that poets of such calibre and expertise will be participating in the work of judging the competition this year.'
The theme for the 25th annual Christopher Tower Poetry Prize Competition, ROOTS, has been inspired by the 500th anniversary of the first founding of Christ Church in 1525. However, the collage idiom of all the publicity images associated with the 25th competition has been carefully chosen in order to situate the theme of ROOTS as a free-flowing stimulus to the imaginations of the entrants, who may, as ever, use it entirely as they wish.
As in every year in which the competition has taken place, the theme is a point of departure as well as an organising principle for the wide variety of poems, in many different forms, that we are privileged to receive, and we look forward to seeing the many imaginative ways in which entrants interpret the challenge of this year’s theme.
Visit the Tower Poetry page to learn more about the competition and how to enter.
