The McLellan Poetry Prize is awarded by the Arran Theatre and Arts Trust as part of the annual McLellan Arts Festival.
Now in its twelfth year, past judges have included Kathleen Jamie, Robert Crawford, Jackie Kay, Peter and Ann Sansom, Michael Laskey, Simon Armitage, David Constantine and Maura Dooley.
A poem in English on any subject, maximum 80 lines.
Prizes:
•1st – £1,500
•2nd – £300
•3rd – £150
•6 commendations of £25
The judge for the McLellan Poetry Competition is Sinéad Morrissey.
Morrissey is the author of five books of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009), and Parallax and Selected Poems (Carcanet 2013, UK; FSG 2015, US). Parallax won the TS Eliot prize and is nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. In her review of Parallax in the Telegraph, Charolette Runcie wrote that the book, “is an ambitious and complex collection, which takes as its broad theme the distance between what we see and how things really are.”
Morrissey has also received the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and first place in the 2007 UK National Poetry Competition. She teaches creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast.
The closing date is 21st June. The winners will be announced at Friday 31st August 2018 at a prize giving event on the Isle of Arran.
Abegail Morley 